# Agent Vault

20 Hacker News commenters recommended Agent Vault and 3 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 5 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Keeps credentials out of AI agents' context via an egress proxy, so agents never handle raw keys. Critics note it has no security audit and doesn't stop all exfiltration.

## Why people recommend it

- Keeps credentials out of agent context (2 comments): "there was no solution that kept credentials out of an agent’s context, preventing theft and unauthorized actions" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50106207)) "The credentials-out-of-context design is what stood out to me." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50106684))
- Interface-agnostic, works without modifying agents (3 comments): "Where Agent Vault shines is that it fits right into the tools and workflows that your agents are already using" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47884389)) "we feel like this is the right approach in terms of interface-agnostic ergonomics" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47884189)) "interface-agnostic credential brokering without modifying the agent itself" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47900150))
- Encrypted credentials, none stored in plaintext (2 comments): "There's not really any reason to be storing sensitive keys in plaintext on your local disk that the agent can access." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48715132)) "The nice thing about Agent Vault is the encryption of credentials" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48494724))
- Simple, auditable design (2 comments): "Simpler, auditable, handles multi-recipient natively, no web of trust complexity." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47206838)) "This feels cleaner to me." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47899573))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [OneCLI](https://hackerapproved.com/p/onecli.md): 39 recommend
- [SOPS](https://hackerapproved.com/p/sops.md): 28 recommend
- [HashiCorp Vault](https://hackerapproved.com/p/hashicorp-vault.md): 26 recommend
- [Kloak](https://hackerapproved.com/p/kloak.md): 13 recommend
- [AWS Secrets Manager](https://hackerapproved.com/p/aws-secrets-manager.md): 8 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Agent Vault", https://hackerapproved.com/p/agent-vault/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).