AI Assisted Development Privacy and Data Protection
Wing's AI development features are disabled by default. As long as the features are left disabled, no code or other data of any kind will ever be uploaded to an AI provider. Before you can use any of Wing's AI development features, you must complete all of the following steps: (1) select an AI provider in Wing, (2) pay for an AI provider account, (3) obtain an API key, (4) install the key into Wing, and (5) give explicit permission to upload parts of your code to the AI provider.
Unless all of these steps are taken, none of the AI assisted development features will work. Instead, you will be presented with a dialog asking you to enable and configure the feature or, if the feature is already enabled, then you will be presented with a dialog asking for your permission to upload content to the AI provider.
Wing will obtain upload permission the first time you try to use an AI assisted development feature in a project. Or, you can display the permission dialog with the Approve Uploads to OpenAI item in the AI tool's Options menu.
After giving upload permission, you can revoke it at any time with the Revoke Upload Permission item in the AI tool's Options menu.
Note that enabling AI development and giving upload permissions is done on a project-by-project basis, so you can leave the feature disabled in some projects and enable it in others.
AI Provider Privacy
Once AI development is enabled, you should be mindful that all or part of your code will be sent to the AI provider by secure encrypted https connection. Files that are uploaded to the AI provider are removed again when they are no longer needed, when the project is closed, or when Wing quits. This may fail in the case of a network outtage but Wing keeps track of uploaded resources and retries their removal periodically as long as it is running.
Wingware has no way of controlling whether the AI provider will continue to store your code behind the scenes or use it in ways that you might not intend. You should review the AI provider's privacy and data protection statements.
Quality and Safety
Similarly, Wingware has no way to assess the quality and safety of results you obtain from the AI provider. AI suggestion and refactoring are both capable of directly altering your code in the editor. If you use them, you should use a revision control system or other means to carefully review all changes made to your code before you execute that code or accept it into your code base.
AI chat, on the other hand, does not make changes directly to editors. It outputs results only into the chat itself. The code shown in the chat cannot be executed by Wing unless you manually copy it into your code or into the Python Shell or Debug Probe in Wing.
Monitoring Data Being Shared
You can inspect what Wing sends to the provider with Show Console in the AI tool's Options menu. This displays the complete content of all requests made for AI code suggestion, refactoring, description-driven development, and AI chat.
