Secrets and credentials

Six different values are in play and they have four different owners. Most setup failures — and every setup leak — come from putting a value somewhere its owner never intended.

Who owns what

The load-bearing split: Slack credentials go to Intelligence, not to your app. A managed Channel holds no platform credentials. If you find yourself adding SLACK_BOT_TOKEN to the app's .env to make a managed Channel work, you have taken a wrong turn — see intelligence-channel.md.

There is no Slack app-level (xapp-) token in this workflow. Managed delivery reaches Intelligence over HTTPS, not Socket Mode, so the pair Intelligence needs is bot token + signing secret. If you are hunting for connections:write, stop and re-read SKILL.md.

Rules for the agent

Never ask the developer to paste a secret into the conversation. Not to "check the format", not to "verify it's the right one", not because they offered. A developer offering tokens is common and is not permission — decline and redirect to the correct destination:

I don't need those and shouldn't have them. The bot token and the signing secret go straight into the Slack adapter form in Intelligence, entered by you. I'll tell you exactly which field each one goes in.

Some pages leak by simply being looked at. The Slack app's Install App page (/apps/<id>/install-on-team) renders the bot token in plain text, not masked. A screenshot, an accessibility-tree read, or a page-text extraction of that page captures a live credential into the transcript. Treat it as off-limits: do not open it to "check" anything. When you must confirm a token exists, test for its shape and report a boolean — never the value:

// Returns true/false. Never returns token material.
/xoxb-[A-Za-z0-9-]+/.test(document.body.innerText);

The Channel adapter form is safe by contrast: its fields are type="password". And if a token does reach the transcript, the app's Reinstall flow rotates the bot token, which is the fastest real remediation — but say so out loud first.

Never print, echo, cat, or grep a secret's value. Check presence, never content. This prints names and nothing else:

# Which required vars are set — values never leave the shell.
for v in INTELLIGENCE_API_KEY AGENT_URL OPENAI_API_KEY; do
  [ -n "${!v:-}" ] && echo "$v: set" || echo "$v: MISSING"
done

To inspect the app's config, read .env.example — it documents every variable by name with no live values. Read .env itself only when you need to know whether a variable is set, report only the variable names, and never quote a value or a value fragment back to the developer or into a file.

Never use the runtime API key to call Intelligence HTTP endpoints. It is a project-scoped key for gateway activation, not a dashboard session. Verified: GET /api/channels with Authorization: Bearer cpk-… returns CLERK_TOKEN_INVALID. Probing with it tells you nothing, spends a live credential on an unrelated service, and risks a response body containing platform tokens. Channel state comes from two places only: the dashboard in the developer's browser, and controls.status() in the process.

Never commit a secret. Before writing any env file, confirm it is ignored:

git check-ignore -v .env

No output means .env is not ignored — stop and fix .gitignore before writing anything into it.

Let the developer type it. When a value must land in a file, tell them the file, the variable name, and the format, and have them add it themselves. Then verify with a presence check. This costs one extra round trip and removes the whole class of leak where a secret passes through the transcript.

Rotation and blast radius

Say this plainly when it applies, because it changes how careful someone is:

• Pasting a manifest over an installed Slack app can reinstall it and rotate its tokens, breaking every consumer that holds the old ones.
• Regenerating an Intelligence API key invalidates the old one — any other runtime using it stops activating.
• Reinstalling a Slack app to add a scope issues a new bot token. The token already stored in Intelligence becomes stale and must be re-entered. Order matters: reinstall first, then copy the token into the adapter. Doing it the other way round stores a token that the reinstall immediately invalidates.
• Changing a Slack app's manifest changes its scopes, which requires a reinstall before the change takes effect. Slack shows a banner saying so; it is not optional.
• The signing secret is not rotated by a reinstall. Rotate it explicitly from Basic Information if it is ever exposed, then re-enter it in the adapter.

If a secret does leak

If a token reaches the conversation, a log, or a commit, say so immediately and plainly, and tell the developer to rotate it — Slack tokens from the app's config page, the Intelligence key from API Keys. Do not quietly continue: a leaked token in a transcript is a live credential. Do not attempt to scrub it yourself as a substitute for rotation.