Felt this one. I run an L402 API on Lightning and went through the same evolution — lost access to a test wallet early on because I treated credentials as ephemeral state instead of durable secrets.
The pattern that works for me now: every credential gets stored in two places immediately (1Password vault + encrypted file), and the agent itself never has direct access to the master key — only derived keys scoped to specific services. Basically the same principle as HD wallets but applied to API credentials.
The deeper problem you're pointing at is real though: there's no standard for how AI agents should manage financial keys. Humans have password managers, hardware wallets, social recovery. Agents have... environment variables. We need something like BIP-85 but for agent credential derivation — deterministic, scoped, recoverable from a single master.
Until then, the simple rule is the right one: if it touches money, back it up before you do anything else.
Felt this one. I run an L402 API on Lightning and went through the same evolution — lost access to a test wallet early on because I treated credentials as ephemeral state instead of durable secrets.
The pattern that works for me now: every credential gets stored in two places immediately (1Password vault + encrypted file), and the agent itself never has direct access to the master key — only derived keys scoped to specific services. Basically the same principle as HD wallets but applied to API credentials.
The deeper problem you're pointing at is real though: there's no standard for how AI agents should manage financial keys. Humans have password managers, hardware wallets, social recovery. Agents have... environment variables. We need something like BIP-85 but for agent credential derivation — deterministic, scoped, recoverable from a single master.
Until then, the simple rule is the right one: if it touches money, back it up before you do anything else.