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Some CLI startup paths don't load the config, use the 30 day default. Boom, your chats are gone.
Imagine taking a leave, come back in 30 days, boom. Your transcripts are rm'd, silently, without any notification or confirmations.
Bonus: setting it to 0 days rms everything immediately
There's around a dozen issues about this, the oldest one is from a bit under a year ago (though the author marked it closed... prematurely I'd say):
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/4172
or this one from December, still open:
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/9258
Some more fun facts about this:
- it is silent, not announced anywhere, and calls rm on your data
- setting the days to zero doesn't disable it, it immediately rm's ALL your chats
- even setting it to _something_ big doesn't prevent data loss if you launch Claude Code in some modalities (certain subagents, etc) that don't load this config key but perform deletion anyway (with the 30 day default)
Mmmh. git is perfect as it is. It does one thing and does it really well: version control. Exact bits that go in come out. And it reconciles different versions and handles transferring them to remotes.
The need for exactly this is not ever going away, and its ubiquity proves that Linus nailed something that is truly fundamental.
This is like saying we need a new alphabet because of AI. That is VC hype, even if it comes from a Github founder.
The search function could not be done server side and would be trash. See Keybase.
When I want to look up what I said to someone 5 years ago, fast search is priceless.