Privacy & Data Storage Policy

1. Engineering Data Stored Locally

All engineering assets, caches, and indexes reside strictly on your local disk (defaulting to ~/.vela-dev/ for preview builds, and ~/.vela/ for production).

There is no centralized cloud database, no cloud user account registry, and no background sync service. Your engineering context belongs entirely to your machine, giving you full control over backup and retention.

2. Zero Telemetry & No Behavioral Tracking

Vela embeds zero commercial tracking SDKs, analytics beacons, retention logging, or silent crash reporting modules.

Your project source code, local session logs, and prompts are never sent to Vela servers. All log parsing, regex extraction, and memory matching execute locally.

3. Private Library Retrieval Boundaries

Documents flagged as Private in your Library are accessible only for manual reading and inspection within the desktop client.

Vela's stdio MCP server and recall tools explicitly filter out Private Library items. This boundary governs Vela's internal retrieval interfaces, rather than serving as an OS sandbox; scripts or third-party coding agents explicitly approved by you remain subject to their own permissions and data processing policies.

4. Explicit Network Communication & Model Data Flows

Vela initiates no unrequested background network connections. Do not confuse "local-first" with an air-gapped environment. The following user actions generate standard network traffic:

• Coding Agent Provider Data Flows: Coding agents (such as Claude Code, Codex CLI, and Cursor) communicate with their respective model providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, etc.) using your configured API keys or platform sessions. Vela functions strictly as a local observer parsing filesystem logs.
• Explicit URL Knowledge Imports: When you input an external URL in the Library to fetch documentation, Vela makes HTTP requests to retrieve and parse the requested page.
• Approved External Commands: Shell scripts or third-party agent invocations explicitly approved by an engineer within Workflows or Lab execute their own logic and may make network calls.
• Outbound Link Clicks: Clicking GitHub links, external documentation, or release notes opens the target URL in your default system browser.

5. Data Cleanup & User Control

To remove all indexed data, quit Vela and any running CLI/MCP processes, back up desired files, and delete your local data directory (~/.vela-dev or ~/.vela). This permanently removes the SQLite database and managed assets (Memory, Workflows, Guidelines, Library, Checkpoints).

Deleting this directory will not revert code modifications previously committed to your project Git repositories, nor does it delete raw logs or system notification histories retained by external agent harnesses.