OneCLI – OSS credential gateway that keeps secrets out of AI agents

hey HN, Jonathan and Guy here, creators of OneCLI (https://onecli.sh/). OneCLI is an open source vault for AI Agents.Traditional vaults are used to store your secrets and, on demand, provide them to you all in a secure way, trusting the person to keep them safe. We figured that in the agent's world, this is not the case, as you don't know what happens with the secret after it's delivered to the agent, or where it was saved. Or maybe someone even manipulated them to hand them over...From that understanding, we decided to build a network gateway that sits between your AI agents and the services they call. OneCLI matches the request by host/path, verifies the agent should have access, swaps the placeholder for the real credential, and forwards the request. the secrets set inside the OneCLI vault, encrypted on rest, or could fetch in realtime from your bitwarden / 1password wallets.Demo - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5e5pbPEzZfY.We started working on this by accident, even though our careers were in the security space. We were working on a devtool called ChartDB, an open-source DB tool. When OpenClaw took off back in January, we started using it to orchestrate agents on top of ChartDB. We quickly understood there is a big issue around auth. Agents need credentials to do real work, but to give them those secrets would not be the best idea. they keep them in their memory and also write them down to local files and their sessions as plain text. And we knew that agents can easily be fooled into giving up those API keys/secrets. So we needed some way to control the agent and stop prompt injections from tricking it into using its services for an attacker's benefit. Not providing the keys to the agent + adding alerts or human-in-the-loop for sensitive operations, in case someone manipulates the agent, and access logs are being audited.We use it ourselves daily. My OpenClaw runs my day across Attio, Gmail, and

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FL score

72

out of 100

Verdict

VALIDATE

high confidence

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A network gateway that intercepts AI agent API calls to inject credentials at request time, preventing agents from ever storing or accessing secrets directly.

The pain

AI agents need real credentials to perform useful work (calling APIs, accessing databases), but giving them secrets is dangerous. Agents store credentials in memory and logs as plaintext, can be tricked via prompt injection into misusing credentials, and operators have no visibility into what happens with secrets after delivery.

The gap

Existing secret management tools (Vault, 1Password, Bitwarden) assume a trusted human operator. They hand over secrets on request with no control over downstream usage. There's no layer that sits between agent and service to enforce access policies, audit usage, or prevent credential exfiltration.

Build angle

Position OneCLI as infrastructure for agent security, not just secret storage. Focus on: (1) the proxy model as a fundamental architectural difference from traditional vaults, (2) integration with existing vault providers to avoid lock-in, (3) audit trails and human-in-the-loop alerts for sensitive operations, (4) real-world agent orchestration use cases (email, CRM, databases) where credential misuse has direct business impact.

Strengths

  • Founders have security backgrounds and built this solving a real problem in their own product (ChartDB)
  • Open source lowers adoption friction and builds trust in security-sensitive category
  • Solves a genuine gap: traditional vaults don't address agent-specific threat model
  • Can integrate with existing vault providers (Bitwarden, 1Password) rather than forcing migration
  • Timing is good, agent orchestration is moving from toy demos to production use
  • Clear technical differentiation: request interception + credential swapping is simple but effective

Risks

  • Market may not yet perceive agent credential management as urgent enough to pay for. Enterprises still treating agents as experiments.
  • Positioning confusion: is this a vault replacement, a vault complement, or infrastructure middleware? Unclear go-to-market.
  • Competitive threat from major vault vendors (HashiCorp, 1Password) adding agent-specific features to existing products
  • Adoption requires agents to be configured to route through OneCLI proxy, adds operational complexity and potential latency
  • Security product with small team is hard to sell to enterprises that want vendor support and SLAs
  • Open source model may limit revenue if users self-host without paying. Unclear monetization path.
  • Depends on AI agent ecosystem maturing. If agents remain niche or consolidate around few platforms, addressable market shrinks.

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