FAQ

No. Sci is a transparent proxy — it forwards whatever credentials Claude Code already sends, including your OAuth session from a Claude Pro or Max subscription. You don't paste a key anywhere, and Sci doesn't store one. (If you prefer key-based auth, that works too — but it's optional.)

There is no Sci server. There's no account to create and nothing is phoned home. Memory lives in a local SQLite database, embeddings are computed on your machine, and your auth is forwarded straight to Anthropic untouched.

The alpha supports Claude Code on macOS (Apple Silicon) — that's where both halves are wired end-to-end. The privacy proxy anonymizes the Anthropic API path Claude Code uses, and the four memory tools are registered with Claude Code over MCP. It's deliberately narrow: we're getting the core pipeline right before widening it.

That's the plan. The memory layer is built on MCP, so any MCP-capable client can use the memory tools — and the proxy already has handlers for OpenAI, OpenRouter, and Google endpoints, not just Anthropic. A tiered access model (sci connect for trusted/standard/public agents like Cursor or Copilot) is designed and coming. Claude Desktop and the web app are a special case: they talk to claude.ai's backend rather than the API path Sci anonymizes, and don't route through the local proxy, so they're not supported in the alpha. Broader agent and provider coverage is on the roadmap.

Your prompt with PII replaced by stable placeholder tokens like [PERSON_1]. The model reasons over the tokens; your real name and email never appear in the outbound request. Run sci verify to see a real before/after on your own machine.

The proxy adds a local hop and a substitution pass — negligible in normal use. The one exception is the very first request after install, which can take 30–120 seconds while the on-device embedding model downloads (~110 MB). After that it's cached.

It's in ~/.sci as a SQLite database. Removing that directory erases all stored memories. Until you do, it stays entirely local — back it up like any other file.

Sci trusts a local CA certificate so it can read your own traffic on your own machine — the same approach as corporate proxies and debugging tools. The CA private key never leaves ~/.sci, and you can distrust or delete it in Keychain Access any time.

Yes — launchctl unload ~/Library/LaunchAgents/dev.sci.helper.plist stops the proxy. Full uninstall steps are in the install guide.

The alpha ships a single macOS arm64 build to keep the surface small. Intel Mac support is deferred — most users are on Apple Silicon.

Include sci status output and recent ~/Library/Logs/sci-helper.log lines, then open a GitHub issue or email casey.zandbergen@gmail.com.