What Usual keeps. What it sends. What it does not claim.
Usual is designed to keep its own data on your computer, while staying honest about the model provider you already use.
Usual's local boundary
- Mining, storage, retrieval, and review run on your computer.
- The default database is outside your repositories at
~/.usual/judgment.sqlite3. - Original Claude and Codex conversations are never modified.
- Usual makes no model API calls, trains no weights, and requires no Usual account.
- The private review UI is loopback-only and is not a public site feature.
Your selected setup and history are separate
My Usual stores selected tools, configuration, scope and installation receipts in private local files. Recall indexes only explicitly selected history without changing the originals. Vibecheck keeps cited findings and corrections locally; Loops keeps scoped routines and receipts. No background monitor or hidden CLI telemetry runs.
A reviewed setup export contains only allowlisted tool IDs, versions and explicitly selected safe options. It excludes transcripts, source quotes, paths, private project names, permissions and private routine bodies. The public examples are synthetic. The website cannot read your local files or start your coding agent.
The important caveat
Usual's local storage does not make your coding model's inference offline. When the agent reads selected excerpts, those excerpts are processed by the provider behind your existing Claude Code or Codex session under that provider's normal policies.
Review before you share. Usual applies deterministic redaction for common secrets before persistence, but it is not complete PII detection. The person using the tool remains responsible for deciding what evidence to select and what to send to the current model.
What the public website contains
The public service exposes product pages, the source-only download, worked examples, and a runnable sample app. It does not expose a private corpus, your local database, or a transcript-ingestion API.
The new collection pages load no third-party browser scripts. Existing legacy pages retain their disclosed browser analytics, and the hosting layer may collect visit and performance data. The local CLI and private review UI do not use the public site's visitor analytics.
Permission is a separate boundary
Usual's modes do not grant permission to delete, spend, publish, share, or change credentials. Past approval is not current authority. These are workflow checks, not a shell sandbox, so the coding client's own permission controls still matter.
Read the source
Usual is MIT-licensed and its public implementation is available in the source repository. Start with the installation guide if you want to inspect the bundle before installing.