Cursor 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 Cursor specifically does to you here

A single file, often several gigabytes, sitting in Application Support on the laptop going back to IT. It is too large to be caught by a casual copy at the last minute and too obscure to be on the checklist, so it is reimaged with everything else.

du -sh ~/Library/Application\ Support/Cursor/User/globalStorage

Where Cursor keeps this in the first place: ~/Library/Application Support/Cursor/User/globalStorage/state.vscdb. One SQLite file holds every conversation. Corruption, an upgrade, or a cleanup takes all of it at once.

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.