Before You Paste Into a Free Model: Draw the Trust Boundary First
Last week a colleague pasted a production config.yml into an AI chat, asked why the connection kept dropping, and got a working fix in three minutes. The file also contained a client secret. Now that secret sits in a model provider's logs. Maybe training data, too. You don't know. That's the problem. Disclosure: This article was prepared as part of MonkeyCode's product outreach. The opinions are mine. I've written here about repo quarantine and dependency triage. This post is narrower: where do you draw the line between your code and a free model? Free model access and a free server are real options, but they shift trust boundaries. MonkeyCode, the open-source platform, offers both. I'm not going to quote quotas or hardware specs — they change faster than blog posts. The question is what you should send in the first place. The Trust Boundary Nobody Draws Think of your AI-assisted workflow as four zones: Zone 0: your terminal / IDE Zone 1: the agent or CLI process Zone 2: the platform API and its logs Zone 3: the model provider's infrastructure Every hop expands the attack surface. Zone 0 is yours. Zone 1 is mostly yours — unless the tool phones home. Zone 2 is someone else's server. "Free server" means Zone 2 is external by default. "Free model access" means your prompt leaves your network and lands in Zone 3. The trust boundary isn't the API call. It's the paste. Three Things That Should Never Cross the Boundary Secrets and credentials. API keys, passwords, tokens, private keys. Obvious, still happens daily. File paths and internal IPs. A stack trace like /srv/customer-42/checkout.py:314 reveals product structure, hostnames, and environment info. Unreleased code structure. AI models may memorize and regurgitate patterns. If your code is patent-sensitive or under NDA, don't feed it the source. Describe the logic instead. A Reproducible Gate: boundary_check.sh Stop relying on discipline. Add a mechanical gate. #!/usr/bin/env bash # boundary_check.sh - blocks high-ris