Upgrade to 8D Secrets.
In 4D, your vault is storage: you put keys in, but nothing reads them back out during the workshop, and that is fine. 8D is the upgrade that makes the vault live. It installs the Infisical Agent and a machine identity so your agent can read your secrets on its own, for local scripts, MCP servers, and scheduled jobs. This is the advanced, opt-in path, and you run it with /upgrade-8d-secrets.
- A vault your agent can read the Infisical Agent runs in the background and renders your secrets to a local file, so any tool can read them with no browser login.
- A machine identity, your agent's keycard a scoped, read-only Universal Auth identity that lets your agent open the vault when no human is logged in.
- Headless, unattended work scheduled jobs and overnight runs can use real API keys without you re-authenticating or pasting anything.
What 8D actually changes.
By default, with the Infisical CLI and a browser login, your vault is a safe place to store keys. Claude can put keys in, but nothing reads them back out at runtime. 8D installs the Infisical Agent and a machine identity so your agent can pull those secrets in and use them, with no browser and no prompts.
Keys live in the vault. Your deployed app reads its own copy from Vercel. Nothing on your machine reads the vault.
The Agent renders your secrets to a local file and keeps it fresh. Local tools, MCP servers, and scheduled jobs read them through one wrapper.
When you actually need it.
Most of Workshop Day does not need 8D. Reach for it only when something on your machine has to read a real key on its own:
- A local script or CLI that authenticates with an API key (for example, the official Exa CLI).
- An MCP server that needs a token in its environment.
- A scheduled or overnight job that runs while you are away.
If a connector or a provider sign-in already does the job, use that 4D path instead. Your deployed app reads its keys from Vercel and does not need this. 8D is for unattended, headless reads.
What it sets up.
Think of the machine identity as a keycard you hand a robot so it can open the vault when no human is logged in. It is not the keys themselves, it is the robot's login.
A scoped, read-only Universal Auth identity in Infisical, with a Client ID and a client secret.
A small background service that authenticates with that identity and renders your secrets to a local file, kept fresh.
Tools run through scripts/with-8d-env.sh -- <your command> to see the secrets as environment variables.
The one rule that matters.
Never paste your client secret into chat. That defeats the whole point.
The other values the setup needs are identifiers, not secrets: the project ID, domain, environment, secret path, and the Client ID (which is like a username). Those are safe to give Claude. The client secret is the password. You type it once, at a hidden terminal prompt, and it never appears on screen or in a chat log.
The entire reason for a machine identity is that your secret lives only in a local file the agent reads, never in a conversation. If a key ever lands in chat, treat it as burned and rotate it.
Run it.
In your agent-native-os project in Claude, run the command. It confirms you actually need 8D, walks you through creating the machine identity in Infisical, collects the identifiers, and finishes the wiring. The walkthrough deck shows every screen.
/upgrade-8d-secrets