Claude Code 'Don't Ask Again' option silently writes secrets into config files

Early on 11-08-2026, a post by security firm Apiiro reached the Hacker News front page, arguing that the Don't Ask Again option in Claude Code can push sensitive data into public repositories. It drew 106 points and 74 comments within hours. Around 07:02, an article on DEV Community supplied the underlying figures, citing a The Hacker News report from 11-07: Apiiro scanned .claude/settings.local.json across public repositories and found that 104,185 such files sit in 103,617 of them. Of those, 1,122 files contain at least one exposed key and 1,379 keys appear in total, with 215 recovered by neither gitleaks nor TruffleHog. The article also spelled out the mechanism: Claude Code asks permission before some Terminal commands, and choosing "Yes, and don't ask again" causes it to store an allow rule as plain text in .claude/settings.local.json. In the example given, a proposed psql command carried the password right after PGPASSWORD=, and the saved rule captured a full command including the password, so committing the file can leak the credentials.

In the early hours of 11-09-2026, another DEV Community piece approached the incident from the developer side. Beyond quoting the 1,122 public files figure, it argued that configuration files generated automatically by agentic tools are easily overlooked, even though teams already review .env files, and provided steps to audit a repository within 10 minutes, remediate after exposure and detect the problem with scanning tools. By noon that day, Landian had put together the fuller account: after extending the scan to Git history, shared settings files and stored agent session records, the researchers counted 2,539 distinct credentials in 1994 repositories, most of them still valid, which suggested developers had not noticed the leak. Landian also reported that a Claude Code product lead said the team is working on prevention measures, including basic credential scanning, and that users should check their config and rotate anything already exposed. As of the latest feedback, no formal fix release has been publicly reported.