Coding agent traces can contain sensitive data, so the defaults are chosen to be useful without recording the contents of your files. This page lists what is captured, what is not, and how to change it.

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The three settings

Capture is controlled by three independent settings. Two are on by default and one is off: The split between tool_details and tool_content is the important one. Knowing that a tool read src/auth.py is useful for understanding a trace. Recording what was inside that file is where source code and secrets would end up, so it is off unless you turn it on.
Turning tool_content on records file contents and command output in your traces. Only do this if you understand what your team’s tools read, and review your data retention settings first.

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What is always captured

Regardless of the three settings above, every trace records the structure of the work:
  • The model name and provider for each model call.
  • Token counts, including cache reads and cache writes, and the calculated cost.
  • The name of each tool that ran, its duration, and whether it succeeded or failed.
  • The session and turn structure, so you can see which tools a given prompt triggered.
  • The project name you chose and, if set, a user identifier.
This is metadata about the work rather than the content of it, which is why it is not configurable.

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Change the settings

The installer asks about all three during setup. The prompt shows the default in brackets, and pressing Enter accepts it:
To change a setting later, re-run the installer for any tool. It asks the questions again and rewrites the stored settings.
Re-running the installer replaces the whole stored block rather than merging into it. If you previously turned something on and then accept the default, the override is removed. That is what makes a re-install able to repair a machine that was configured wrongly.

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Override per session

All three settings can be overridden with environment variables, which take precedence over the stored configuration. This is useful when you want one session excluded:
To turn tracing off entirely for a session, without uninstalling anything:

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Inspect what would be sent

To see the spans without transmitting them, turn on dry-run mode and use the tool as normal:
Spans are written to ~/.atatus/harness/logs/<harness>.log instead of being sent. This is the most direct way to confirm what your settings actually capture before rolling them out to a team.

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Where settings are stored

The three settings live under a logging key in ~/.atatus/harness/config.json. Only values that differ from the defaults are written, so a file with no logging overrides is running the defaults. The stored block carries a version stamp. If a future release changes what a default means, the installer asks that question again and tells you why, rather than silently keeping an answer you gave under different terms.

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Next steps