using them in VSCode all the time for months now. Qwen from Alibaba Cloud, Deepseek from deepseek.com. none of them upload entirety of codebase or even attempt to.

in fact, opposite. Chinese AI seem to post-process heaviliy locally.

they are always using head / tail, grep, sed, and do as much as they can locally and extrac meaningful data and send home (AI inference chunks). only what is really needed.

it is actually hard to force Chinese AI modesl to read full files, they really do not want to see them. even 400 lines files, is usally hit first for first line, first 50 lines. and at most 200 lines chunk reads, and give up at one or two reads.