GitHub Copilot 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 GitHub Copilot specifically does to you here

The sessions are small — under a megabyte across dozens of workspaces — so this is the cheapest record in the set to preserve and the easiest to forget, because its size never makes it visible to anyone managing disk.

du -sh "$HOME/Library/Application Support/Code/User/workspaceStorage"

Where GitHub Copilot keeps this in the first place: ~/Library/Application Support/Code/User/workspaceStorage/<hash>/chatSessions/. History is keyed to the workspace path. Rename or move the project and the chat panel comes up empty.

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.