Effective 24 August 2026.
What Chef stores
On a local Codex host, household members, explicit dietary and safety requirements, preferences, planning defaults, weekly plans, grocery lists, saved recipes and meal outcomes are stored as readable Markdown under ~/Documents/Chef by default. Advanced users and automated tests can use CHEF_DATA_DIR to select a different directory.
MEMORY.md stays compact. Detailed plans and shopping lists live in weekly files, and reusable recipe files exist only when the user explicitly asks to save, favourite or repeat a recipe.
When local files are unavailable
Some hosts cannot read or write local files. Chef can still plan and cook with the context in that conversation, but it must not claim that a preference, plan or recipe was saved. The host may separately provide its own memory features under its own terms.
What Chef does not store
Chef must not persist retailer credentials, cookies, payment information, screenshots or raw retailer pages. The plugin does not send local Markdown files to Daniel Ferguson.
A host agent or optional Computer Use provider may process information under its own privacy terms. Review those terms before enabling browser automation.
Local protection and deletion
Chef's Markdown is protected only by your operating-system permissions, device security and backups. Chef does not provide application-level encryption, so anyone with access to the operating-system account or backups may be able to read it.
You can inspect, edit, copy, back up or delete the folder yourself. Chef does not automate destructive deletion. Version 0.2 also never migrates, reads, modifies or deletes an existing chef.sqlite3; archived 0.1 data remains under your control.
Contact
Privacy questions can be sent to gday@danferg.com.