Data and Privacy

Wenlan is designed so the durable context your agents use lives locally first. That context can include project decisions, private constraints, preferences, and work history.

There is no cloud sync or telemetry by default. Connected AI tools may still send prompts to their own model providers; Wenlan's job is to keep the memory layer itself local, inspectable, and shared across tools.

Wenlan exposes human-facing artifacts under ~/.wenlan. The daemon database lives under the operating system's application data directory and is linked from ~/.wenlan/db for convenience.

The important files are readable without a special app: pages are Markdown, session logs are Markdown, and project status is stored beside the session records.

Raw captures and recall live in the daemon-owned store. Pages, session logs, and project status are readable Markdown projections under ~/.wenlan.

This keeps search fast and structured while giving people inspectable artifacts for pages, handoffs, and status without pretending every memory is a Markdown file.

Wenlan stores, embeds, deduplicates, and serves hybrid search without requiring a local model download or Anthropic API key.

ANTHROPIC_API_KEY is only used when you explicitly opt into daemon-side Anthropic work with the key setup path. Optional model and API paths can add heavier language features, but they are not required for the basic memory loop.

If a memory is wrong, capture the correction with why it supersedes the old fact. If a memory should be removed entirely, use /forget with the memory ID.

Delete and forget operations are separate from service uninstall. For distilled pages, inspect the Markdown directly. User-edited pages are treated carefully so automated distillation does not overwrite human work casually.