sxsphinxstack

Skills / Starter / Store user preferences safely

Starter Code skill

Store user preferences safely

Store user preferences with minimal data, clear ownership, versioned schemas, and reliable synchronization.

Treat preferences as user data with lifecycle and authorization requirements, not as an unbounded settings blob.

Procedure

  1. Inventory each preference, its purpose, sensitivity, owner, default, and retention need.
  2. Choose local, account-level, workspace-level, or device-level storage deliberately.
  3. Define a versioned allowlist schema with types, bounds, and migration behavior.
  4. Authorize reads and writes against the correct user and tenant on the server.
  5. Encrypt sensitive values where justified and never store credentials as preferences.
  6. Define offline updates, synchronization, conflicts, reset, export, and deletion behavior.
  7. Apply safe defaults when a value is missing, obsolete, or invalid.
  8. Test cross-account isolation, concurrent edits, migrations, corruption, and account deletion.

Guardrails

  • Do not place sensitive preferences in URLs or broadly readable browser storage.
  • Never trust a stored preference to grant permission or bypass validation.
  • Avoid retaining historical values unless users need and understand that history.

Related skills

  • Resolve a merge conflict — Resolve a merge conflict by reconstructing both changes, choosing the intended combined behavior, and testing the integrated result.
  • Trace a dns resolution — Trace DNS resolution from client search and cache through recursive and authoritative answers, DNSSEC, delegation, and address selection.
  • Reproduce a cli error — Reproduce a CLI error with exact arguments, input, environment, version, exit status, streams, and minimal conditions.