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Terma collects two kinds of data from your machine: telemetry exported by your coding agents, and hook events recorded by Terma’s own hooks. They follow different rules.

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What hooks record

Terma’s hooks report structure, not conversation: session ids, file paths an agent edited, tool names, timings, models, and your plan’s usage windows. Hooks do not open prompts, tool input or output, error text, or transcripts. The one exception is Codex, whose export leaves out the assistant’s replies. When — and only when — Codex already exports your prompts for the repository, Terma’s Codex hook reads that turn’s replies from Codex’s local session log so the conversation is complete. --prompts off withholds them too.

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What agents export

Prompt text, model responses, and tool content reach Terma only through the agent’s own telemetry export, under the switches you chose: Your agents send prompt text and model responses by default. install does not ask; it keeps your last choice for the project and prints how to change it on its Prompts line. A repository can also commit a policy that narrows what is sent for everyone who works in it. See Repository-local policy.
Codex can stop exporting tool output but cannot suppress native tool arguments. Cursor and Antigravity hooks never read prompt, response, or command text.

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What every commit sends

post-commit records an event for every commit so Terma can measure how much work agents contributed. For a commit with no agent session in it, that event carries only the commit’s identity and size: SHA, remote URL with credentials removed, branch, author email, file count, and lines added and deleted. File names and per-file stats are included only on commits that carry a session trailer. Merge and squash commits produce nothing.

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What stays on your machine

Nothing secret is ever written into a repository. The committed .terma/settings.json names only the project, and the committed hook files are inert on a machine without terma. A server key is write-only: it can send telemetry into its one project, but cannot read anything. Revoke a key from your project’s settings in the Terma web app.

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Sign-in

terma setup and terma login use a browser handoff with PKCE. You approve the CLI in your browser, and a single-use code valid for 60 seconds is handed to a listener on 127.0.0.1. The code is useless without a verifier that never leaves the CLI process. terma logout revokes your sessions on the server, not just locally.

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Hooks never get in your way

  • Every hook ends in || true, so a missing or broken terma never fails a commit.
  • Hooks never make a network request; they append to the local spool, which is delivered in the background.
  • prepare-commit-msg finishes in under 50 ms, a budget enforced in CI.
  • TERMA_HOOKS=0 turns every Terma hook off immediately.

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Limits worth knowing

  • Attribution is not authentication. Commit trailers and agent identities attribute work among colleagues. Anyone with commit access can write a trailer by hand, so treat them as who to credit the work to, not as proof of who did it.
  • Processes running as you can read your credentials and keys. If you run untrusted code, run terma logout and revoke the project key in the web app.
  • Codex’s key is visible to local processes. Per-repository Codex routing passes the project’s telemetry key as a launch argument, which any process running as your user can see while the session runs. It is a write-only, project-scoped key that you can revoke.

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Reporting a vulnerability

Do not open a public issue. Email security@terma.ai.