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Proof artifacts live with the project, under its .ade/ directory on the machine that owns the project. Files sit on disk; their owners, review state, captions, and kind live in ADE’s project database. The pairing is what lets an artifact still know which PR and chat it belongs to even though the file on disk is just an image or video.

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Storage

Captured files land under the project’s .ade/ scaffold: 
.ade/artifacts/computer-use/
  <uuid>.png      # screenshots
  <uuid>.mp4      # recordings
  <uuid>.zip      # browser traces
Each capture also writes one row to the project database (.ade/ade.db) with the artifact’s kind, caption, storage URI, and owner link. That metadata — not the file itself — is what surfaces the proof in the chat drawer and at PR review.
For a project opened on a remote runtime, proof is stored on the remote host, not your desktop machine. The desktop drawer fetches preview bytes over the same connection as the rest of the remote project; the raw files are not synced back, so proof is viewable while the runtime that captured it is reachable.

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Configuration and troubleshooting

There is no automatic retention policy — captures persist until the project is cleaned up. Disk is the budget; nothing ages out on its own.Dismiss or remove proof through ADE rather than deleting files directly from .ade/artifacts/computer-use/ — deleting on disk leaves database rows pointing at missing files. Removing through ADE clears the metadata too.
Grant Screen Recording permission to ADE in System Settings → Privacy & Security, then quit and relaunch ADE. macOS only applies the permission to a fresh launch.
Run ade proof status --text and confirm capture is reported as available. Capture relies on the macOS built-in screencapture; on unsupported platforms the command exits non-zero. If status looks wrong, relaunch ADE.
ade proof capture exits non-zero when it can’t resolve an owner and no --owner-kind/--owner-id flags were passed — an un-owned proof has no home in the UI. Run it from inside an ADE chat or lane session, or pass the owner explicitly.
Each input needs real content through path, uri, text, or json; an input with none of these is skipped. Path-based inputs must resolve inside an allowed import root — the project’s .ade/artifacts or .ade/tmp, the OS temp dir, or ~/.agent-browser. Paths outside those roots are rejected.

Capture proof

The ade proof capture, attach, and ingest commands.

Configuration overview

Where ADE keeps the rest of your project state.