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AI Literacy for Developers·A reliable AI workflow

Using AI safely at work

Keep secrets and personal data out of prompts, respect licenses and disclosure, and require human review.

Beginner 13 min read Lesson 4 of 300 Challenge included
What you will be able to do
  • Never paste secrets such as keys, tokens or passwords.
  • Redact personal data before sharing code or text.
  • Check the license of anything you copy from AI output.
  • Disclose AI use and require human review for risky actions.

In plain English

Anything you paste into an AI tool can leave your machine and be stored or used for training, so treat a prompt like an outbound message. Secrets are things like API keys, passwords and tokens, and they must never be pasted because they can leak through logs, retention or the provider. Personal data means anything that identifies a person, such as names, emails or customer records, and it should be redacted before you share code. Generated code is not automatically safe to reuse, because it can carry a license you must respect, so check before you copy it. Tell your team and reviewers when output is AI-generated, and never let a model perform a destructive or money-moving action without a human approving it.

Step by step

  1. 1Scan a snippet for secrets with a quick search before pasting.
  2. 2Replace real names, emails and IDs with placeholders.
  3. 3Check the license terms of any code you intend to reuse.
  4. 4Add a note that a change was AI-assisted in your pull request.
  5. 5Require a human to approve any destructive or customer-facing action.
before-you-paste.txtText
CHECK BEFORE PASTING
- No API keys, tokens, passwords or private keys
- Names, emails and identifiers are redacted
- Customer records and payment data are removed
- Any reused code has a license I can comply with
- I will disclose that this work was AI-assisted

Common mistakes

  • Pasting an API key is unrecoverable in practice, because you must rotate it everywhere it is used.
  • Sharing customer data violates privacy obligations even when the tool is internal.
  • Assuming generated code is license-free is wrong, since it can mirror copyrighted material you do not own.
  • Hiding that you used AI from reviewers breaks trust and skips the review step that catches mistakes.
Your turn

Write your paste checklist

Easy

List three checks you would run on a snippet before pasting it into an AI tool at work.

TEXT · starter
1.
Check your understanding before moving on.
Knowledge checkQuestion 1

What should you do before pasting code that contains customer records?

Select an answer to continue
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Next: Building a review checklist
Lesson 4 of 300 · 0% of course