Atelier-Secrets

When you work in a remote development environment, often you need some secrets.

For instance your GitHub token.

And the way Atelier deals with these secrets I think is kind of cool because we don't actually put them in the workspace.

So that means the agent can never actually see them.

Let's see what that looks like.

I have a workspace here and if I just print, if I just print my GitHub token, you'll see that we'll get a super weird value that is not a real GitHub token, but that is the one that's actually set in the environment variable in this docker container for the workspace.

But when we actually go and make a network call from Here, for instance GitHub API user, you can see that it does actually work and it does authenticate as me and can find all my data.

That is because Atelier intercepts the data.

The network traffic that originates from this workspace it intercepts notices that this fake token is in the HTTP header and it replaces it with the real header, with the real token outside of the sandbox.

This works for the built in secret like the GitHub token.

But you can also add your own.

If I can go to the project settings here you can go to Secrets and there you can add your own tokens.

So if you're working on an AI app and you need like a OpenAI API key or Gemini key or something like that, you would put them in here and you can sleep a little bit better, because you don't have to fear the agents exfiltrating your API key.

there's a few more similar things.

If I go here again you'll notice that we also have a SSH key, and I actually use that because I often actually deploy to production from these workspaces and to do that I need to have a private SSH key that the remote server will accept.

And instead of putting that private SSH key, into the workspace where the agent can see it, we actually store it on the outside like you paste it here.

We store it in encrypted format outside of the workspace and then the workspace itself, it gets a socket connection available and that makes SSH just work without the fear of someone accidentally or on purposely exfiltrating your SSH key.