Claude Code stores 43MB of your conversations. Cursor saves your passwords in plaintext JSONL. Cline is the only one that puts your API key in the OS keychain — but it still archives everything you say.
Not one of them tells you this is happening.
Why I Did This
Two weeks ago, I discovered Claude Code had silently archived 43MB of my complete conversation history on my machine. I wrote about it. The comments asked: "What about Cursor? What about Cline?"
I tested them. The results were more nuanced than I expected.