Case study

ghost

Open-source CLI (28 stars) that resets device and machine identifiers for AI coding IDEs, with guided flows, audit logs and restore scripts on Windows and Linux. Positioned as developer privacy hygiene; the project's own docs tell users to comply with each vendor's terms of service.

Source code

PowerShell
Python

The problem

AI coding IDEs fingerprint hardware and machine identifiers. Developers re-imaging a machine, selling hardware, or separating work environments have no clean, documented way to reset those identities, so they fall back to scattered manual registry and config edits.

What I built

GHOST (Guided Hardware & OS Scrubbing Toolkit) is a PowerShell and Python CLI with guided per-IDE reset flows covering Cursor, Windsurf, Trae, Qoder and other AI IDEs, plus audit logs and restore scripts. Pester, ShellCheck and unittest suites run in CI. It is positioned as developer privacy hygiene: the README and SECURITY.md state that users are responsible for complying with each vendor's terms.

Results

28 GitHub stars (verified 2026-11-07). Pester, ShellCheck and unittest suites run on every push via CI. Apache-2.0 licensed.

Last updated November 7, 2026