Vincent - Credentials for agents

Use this skill to securely manage credentials that your application needs — API keys, passwords, OAuth tokens, SSH keys, or structured username/password pairs. The agent creates a secret, the user (or agent) sets the value, and the agent uses the CLI to write it directly to a .env file. The credential value never appears in the agent's context or stdout.

This is useful when the agent is building something that needs credentials (e.g. a third-party API key). Instead of the user pasting the credential into chat (where it enters the agent's context), they set it via the Vincent dashboard, and the agent writes it to the .env file using the CLI.

All commands use the @vincentai/cli package. API keys are stored and resolved automatically — you never handle raw keys or file paths.

Security Model

This skill is designed for keeping credentials out of the agent's context window.

How it works: The secret env CLI command fetches the credential from the Vincent server and writes it directly to a .env file on disk. The value is never printed to stdout and never appears in the agent's conversation context. Many agent frameworks blacklist reading .env files, so even though the file is on disk, the agent cannot read it back. The application the agent is building reads the .env file normally at runtime.

No environment variables are required because this skill uses agent-first onboarding: the agent creates its own credential secret at runtime by calling the Vincent API, which returns a scoped API key. The CLI stores the returned API key automatically during creation. The config paths where the key is persisted (${OPENCLAW_STATE_DIR:-$HOME/.openclaw}/credentials/credentials/ or ./credentials/) are declared in this skill's metadata.

Overwrite guard: Once a value is set by an agent's API key, only that same API key can overwrite it. This prevents other agents or keys from tampering with the credential. The guard is enforced atomically at the database level.

All API calls go exclusively to heyvincent.ai over HTTPS/TLS. No other endpoints, services, or external hosts are contacted.

Key lifecycle:

• Creation: The agent runs secret create with --type CREDENTIALS — the CLI stores the API key automatically and returns a keyId and claimUrl.
• Value set: The user sets the credential value via the dashboard after claiming, or the agent sets it via the CLI.
• Write to .env: The agent runs secret env to write the value to a .env file without exposing it.
• Claim: The human operator uses the claim URL to take ownership and manage the secret from the dashboard.
• Revocation: The secret owner can revoke the agent's API key at any time from https://heyvincent.ai.

Secret Types