logicx24

What I meant to say was, the agents (like Claude Code) often have a "Allow all instances of this command in the session," and that persists to a whitelist for that session. The mechanic here is actually just a prefix match, so `API_KEY=... diff_command` also matches, allowing the agent to reuse the key without asking me. This file also sticks around, so I had another agent read the whitelist and the conversation transcript and do other things automatically without approval.

> if it's not okay for the agent to know the API key permanently, why is it okay for the agent to have one-off use of something that requires the same key?

Read commands vs. write commands. I'm okay having the agent fetch info for me, but I want to approve any state changes.

But if I don't connect it to stuff, then what is it useful for?

One insidious thing is whitelists. If you allow the bot to run a command like `API_KEY=fdafsafa docker run ...`, then the API_KEY will be written to a file, and the agent can then read that in future runs. That bit me once already.

Yeah, agreed. This is probably what that middleware would look like. That's also where you'd add the human approval flow.

True. But it can help me create a lot of useful text so I can represent my self better.

I do wonder what happens when everyone is using agents for this, though. If AI produces the text and AI also reads the text, then do we even need the intermediary at all?