Reticle drives your app and reads what it did. That means it holds real content from real pages, so this page says exactly what it keeps, where it keeps it, and what it takes to make any of it leave.
If you read one line: a verdict is entirely local and needs no account. Nothing is sent anywhere until you run reticle login and reticle link. Without them there is nowhere for anything to go.
On your machine
Everything lands in .reticle/ in your project, and it is yours. Three kinds of thing:
.reticle/ splits into a part meant for git and a part meant to stay local. Flows are the part worth committing: a saved flow is a regression test. Evidence is the part that is not.
What is redacted, and what is not
Credential-shaped fields are redacted when a flow is saved. A value typed into a field whose name looks like a secret is replaced with <redacted: supply at replay>, and replay reads the real value from RETICLE_SECRET_<FIELD> at run time. It keys off the field’s name across every anchor kind (a testid, an accessible name, a signal), so an app without test ids is covered too.
It is name-based, and that is the limit worth knowing. It redacts a password. It does not redact a customer’s name typed into a search box, because nothing about that field says “secret”. A flow records the journey you actually drove.
So: drive staging. Not because the risk is large, but because it is real and avoiding it is free.
Network bodies are not captured by default. Page content that reaches a verdict is the element text and attributes the assertion needed, not a copy of the DOM.
What leaves, only if you ask
reticle login signs this machine in. reticle link binds one repo to one cloud project. Until both have happened, reticle push has nothing to talk to and the sync path is a no-op. The code calls this the no-phone-home default.
Once linked, you choose what syncs:
Telemetry, which is separate from all of the above
The CLI sends anonymous usage events: event names and a random installation id. No code, no page content, no URLs from your app. It is how we know which parts of the product are reached at all.
Feedback is the only free text that ever leaves, it is never collected passively, and RETICLE_FEEDBACK=0 disables it.
What init writes to your project
Run it with --dry-run and it prints the whole plan without writing anything:
--app <dir> picks which app in a monorepo. --no-mcp skips registering the MCP server with your agents and skips the agent rule files with it. --files-only writes the files and stops, without booting your dev server. Last modified on September 25, 2026
