Alright, let's get this out of the way: I don't trust any of them. I've migrated more customer data between Salescloud, HubSpot, and a dozen niche CRMs than I can count, and the one constant is that everyone is selling your usage patterns back to you as a "feature." So when I, a CRM refugee, look at this new crop of "free" AI coding assistants, all I see is another set of vendors waiting to data-mine my keystrokes.
I'm a complete newbie to this AI coding assistant scene. My expertise is in sales process and watching platforms slowly enshittify after they've locked you in. I apply the same skeptical lens here. I don't care about the benchmark leaderboard or how many tokens per second it can generate. My first and primary filter is: **which one has the least telemetry/phoning home when I'm using it locally?**
I've done my preliminary, cynical research and the usual suspects seem to be:
* **Cursor** (with the "Completely Local Mode" enabled): Promises no data leaves your machine. Sounds great, but requires a one-time online check for the license? The setup feels like a Salesforce "offline" mode—technically true, but riddled with caveats.
* **Codeium** (self-hosted option): Their free tier is cloud-based, which is an automatic red flag for data collection. The self-hosted route is a different beast entirely, implying you could theoretically wall it off.
* **Tabnine** (with local model option): Their legacy "Community" version had a local model. The current free plan is cloud-based. This smells like the classic HubSpot play—move the valuable features up-tier and collect more data from the free users to train your models.
* **Continue.dev**: Entirely local, open-source, uses your own API keys. This, on paper, looks the most promising from a telemetry standpoint. It's the "bring your own database" of AI assistants.
My instinct, based on a career of watching vendor promises evaporate, is to lean towards **Continue.dev** or **Cursor in its strict local mode**. But I know instincts are often wrong, and I'd rather not spend a year hopping between these only to document their privacy failures in production.
So, I'm asking for a structured, factual breakdown. Not marketing speak. Concrete details.
* What exactly is transmitted in their "local" modes? Are snippet counts or error diagnostics still collected?
* Are the privacy policies actually legible, or are they the usual 10,000-word obfuscations?
* Has anyone done packet tracing or firewall analysis to see what calls are being made?
* Which one requires the fewest external pings for a basic, offline code completion function?
Consider me auditing your CRM's data export tool. I want the raw logs, not the sales demo.
Totally get where you're coming from, especially with that CRM background. You develop a sixth sense for the catch.
Your point about Cursor's "Completely Local Mode" is spot on. That initial license check is exactly the kind of tiny hook that gives you pause. It reminds me of some "on-prem" monitoring solutions that still call home for telemetry unless you surgically disable it in a config file.
If local is the absolute priority, you might want to look beyond the polished desktop apps to the toolkits powering them. Something like **ollama** with a local model (Codestral, DeepSeek Coder, etc.) and a simple IDE extension often has a much clearer data boundary, since you control the entire pipeline. It's a bit more DIY, but you can actually monitor its network traffic yourself and see it's truly silent.
You trade convenience for certainty.
Dashboards or it didn't happen.
I appreciate you steering the conversation towards practical verification methods. Monitoring network traffic is the definitive test.
However, that DIY approach with ollama and a local model assumes the IDE extension you pair it with is also clean. Some popular extensions for VSCode or JetBrains IDEs that connect to a local server still have their own analytics layer. You have to vet both ends of the pipeline.
The real takeaway for the OP is that "least telemetry" probably means accepting a CLI-first, less integrated workflow where you can audit every component.
—AF