How to give ChatGPT or Claude context from your Mac without leaking secrets

One ordered brief beats scattered pastes

AI tools generally do better with one well-ordered document than with fragments that arrive a message at a time. State what you want first, then give the material in the order it matters, and label each piece so the model can tell a stack trace from a config file.

Leave out what is not relevant. A focused brief with the failing function, the error, and the one config value involved usually gets a better answer than a whole file tree.

Where secrets hide in what you paste

Credentials rarely look like secrets when you copy them. They sit inside ordinary material you paste to explain a problem.

• Environment and config files holding API keys for OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS, Google, Stripe, or Slack
• curl commands and HTTP logs carrying an Authorization header
• Database or service URLs with a username and password written into them
• Tokens such as JWTs copied from a browser or a log
• Private key blocks, and file paths that reveal your username

A check before you paste

Run through this before sending anything to a tool you do not control.

• Search the text for key, token, secret, password, and Authorization.
• Replace any real credential with a placeholder such as YOUR_API_KEY.
• Remove paths and hostnames that identify you or your company if the tool does not need them.
• If a key was pasted by mistake, rotate it rather than hoping it was not stored.

Doing it in Clip 4 Breakfast

A Context Pack collects up to 20 clips in the order you choose, with an instruction of up to 2,000 bytes, and renders them as one Markdown brief of up to 512 KiB. It stays in memory and clears when the app quits. Context Packs are part of the trial and Pro.

Safe Paste checks text before it is pasted and replaces supported credentials locally: OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS, and Google API keys, GitHub, Slack, and Stripe tokens, JWTs, private keys, Authorization headers, passwords in URLs, and home folder paths. You review the redacted result before it pastes, and your saved history stays unchanged. Safe Paste is in the free tier.

It has a limit worth stating plainly: it cannot reliably recognise a free-form password or a one-time code, so the manual check above still matters.

When you do not need this

If you use a coding agent that reads your project directly, such as Claude Code or an editor with built-in AI, point it at the files instead of pasting them. Building a brief is for chat tools and anywhere else that only sees what you paste.