Codex CLI history: offboarding a developer

What leaves with the laptop?

Why this is hard

The offboarding checklist covers repository access, SSO, cloud roles and the laptop itself. It does not cover the directories where AI tools keep their history, because nobody wrote them down — so the record of how a departing engineer built things leaves with the hardware.

What Codex CLI specifically does to you here

The transcripts are text and compress hard, so a leaver's entire Codex history fits in a tarball measured in tens of megabytes. It is the easiest record here to hand over on the last day, and it happens only if someone thought of it.

tar -czf /tmp/codex.tgz -C ~ .codex/sessions && ls -lh /tmp/codex.tgz

Where Codex CLI keeps this in the first place: ~/.codex/sessions/YYYY/MM/DD/rollout-*.jsonl. Nothing prunes ~/.codex/sessions, so it grows until a person deletes it — usually all of it, usually in a hurry.

What a working answer looks like

A working answer means the record survives the machine being wiped, without anyone having to remember to export it on their last day.

Start by measuring what you have. npx promptwake doctor reports what every AI tool on the machine is holding and how much of it sits inside a deletion window — no account, writes nothing, sends nothing anywhere. If the conclusion is that the record should not depend on one laptop, that is what PromptWake captures: prompt, response and the resulting diff, local by default and synced into a shared timeline on the paid tiers.