I don't understand this, what's the point?

How does anyone accidentally give personal information to an LLM? Because either you don't in the first place (eh, I guess, most people?) or you do but for some specific, weird reason (I can't think of any but I guess these exist).

As @frumiousirc said, it is mainly for the copy-paste case (e.g. you want llm to quickly check out contract terms for you without leaking the parties' identities.)

I have to say I find it amusing how a lot expect people to "not be lazy", people are mostly lazy and even sometimes clueless about how much they leak to BigCorps.

It could be useful more as a labor saving device to enable censoring while allowing the human to engage in easy copy-paste. Examples I think of are inclusion of internal DNS names, usernames and human names and email addresses that may be intermixed with log or command output needed to debug some issue.

That said, if these strings are really sensitive and I'm too lazy (or not trusting the human user) to self-censor, I'd not rely on this particular kind of tool for censoring. I'd use local LLMs or cloud LLMs where privacy is part of the contract.

Every time claude inspects `git log` it gets my name and email address.