Someone on r/PromptEngineering built a tool this week that solves a problem I bet half of you have quietly worried about: pasting real client data into ChatGPT or Claude.
Here’s the setup. u/aboudafirhamza kept hitting the same wall. He wanted AI for summaries, rewrites, analysis, all the good stuff, but he didn’t want raw phone numbers, card numbers, API keys, or internal notes flowing through someone else’s servers. So he built a local-only redactor. It scans your text, strips the sensitive bits before anything gets sent, and lets you restore the original once the AI hands the response back.
The twist is the restore part. Most redaction tools just delete the sensitive stuff and leave you with a mangled draft. This one remembers what it swapped out, so you get the AI’s polished output back with your real data slotted right back in. That’s the actual leverage here, not the redaction, the round trip.
Here’s how you’d run this kind of workflow yourself, tool or no tool:
- 🔍 Scan your draft for anything that identifies a real person, account, or secret
- ✂️ Swap it for a placeholder token before you paste into any AI chat
- 🤖 Let the AI do its summary, rewrite, or analysis on the sanitized version
- 🔁 Restore the real values once you’re back in your own document
Pro tip: don’t trust your memory to catch everything. Names and IDs are easy to spot, but the sneaky ones are things like internal project codenames or partial account numbers buried mid-sentence. A simple find-and-replace pass before you paste catches more than you’d think.
One redditor’s whole reply to this post was just remove names and IDs. That’s the baseline. But card numbers, API keys, and secrets need the same treatment, and most people forget those until it’s too late.
If you’re pasting client work into AI tools daily, build yourself a five-minute redact-and-restore habit before your next session. Your clients will never know the difference, and that’s exactly the point! 🔒
Anyone else worried about pasting client data into AI tools?
by u/aboudafirhamza in PromptEngineering