It was an old computer that I had stopped using and let my family use. Most of the sensitive things had already been cleared, but still, when they told me they had “mistakenly run some scripts, only to realize they might not be safe,” I was like... damn...
What followed that bad news was what you can imagine: rotating passwords and cleaning things up. Not knowing how bad it was, we decided to simply wipe and reinstall the entire machine.
But this incident was the last straw. I can’t stand it anymore. I consider myself very cautious and diligent in my security setup, and yet this caught me cold. Looking back, I have used 1Password and Infisical, not to mention cloud IAMs and the macOS Keychain.
But still, due to the need to run local agents and harnesses, and all the inconveniences and tradeoffs I summarized in the blog post, I decided to put some low-sensitivity credentials—API keys for LLMs and analytics, for example—in .env.local or other local files.
And God, Claude is stupid: it keeps printing credentials despite its own guardrails, my prompts, AGENTS.md, etc.
And what's worse, the OpenClaw uses MacOS Keychain which keeps asking for permission, making it extremely annoying and unuseful like the old Windows XP's "need administrator approval"
I am fed up. I decided to start building a secret broker/manager/proxy—whatever you call it. Basically, it’s meant to be a vault where my local agents can get secrets, and it should not be complicated. It should not require cloud storage or freemium nonsense, it should work reliably, and, most importantly, it should be auditable.
It should be auditable because I think agents should be able to tell the vault why they’re accessing it and what project scope they’re working within, and the vault should record that and give them the credentials.
That’s why I started building what I call “GuestSafe.” It’s not meant to be super safe, but it should do a few things really well:
- Local-first
- ffline-first
- Should enforce auditability
- Should have a scope and justification when agents request credentials
As I’m starting to build the thing, I’d like to share it with HN first and get some early feedback. You can check out the blog post I linked there.
(Disclosure: this post is hand typed with ChatGPT spell-check and grammar fix. The URL linked blog-post was written with more Codex help with my 50+ rounds of prompts)