Gemini 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 Gemini CLI specifically does to you here

Whatever the departing engineer had is already partially deleted by the retention default, so offboarding recovers at most the last 30 days — and only if the machine is copied before it is wiped.

du -sh ~/.gemini/tmp 2>/dev/null

Where Gemini CLI keeps this in the first place: ~/.gemini/tmp/<project_hash>/chats/. general.sessionRetention deletes sessions after 30 days, and cleanup is enabled by default.

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.