Use cases / Secrets and AI coding assistants
Keep API keys away from AI coding assistants
Updated September 26, 2026
Cursor, Claude Code and Copilot read your working directory. Keep secrets out of it: no .env file, and agent tools that can use a secret but never read one.
AI coding assistants are built to read your repository — that is how they help. A .env file sitting in the working directory is part of what they read. From there a production key can end up in a prompt, a generated snippet, a bug report or a commit, without anyone deciding to share it.
Remove the file, keep the workflow
bippass run decrypts your project's secrets on your machine and passes them straight into the process you start. Nothing is written to disk, so there is no .env for an assistant to index.
$ bippass run -- npm start $ bippass run --env staging -- ./server
Give your agent tools, not values
bippass agent install sets up the agents it finds on your machine — Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, Windsurf, Codex, Gemini and others — with two things: a skill that tells the agent to keep credentials in BipPass and never print or ask for one, and an MCP server it can call.
$ bippass agent install $ bippass agent install --agent cursor $ bippass agent install --project # into this repo, for the team
The MCP server has no tool that returns a secret value. list_secrets returns key names only, and run executes a command with secrets in its environment and scrubs the values back out of the output before the agent sees it. The agent can use a secret; it cannot read one, so it never enters the model context or your transcript.
Catch the secret an agent hardcoded
Agents sometimes paste a key straight into source while fixing something else. bippass scan checks staged files for secret patterns, and the pre-commit hook runs it on every commit.
$ bippass hook install $ bippass scan --all # the whole working tree, once
The honest limit: this protects what an assistant reads, not what it can execute. An agent with a shell running as you can run bippass run exactly as you can. What BipPass removes is the plaintext file that sits on disk whether anything is running or not.