Some really broad assumptions here, and youre being unclear.

"When you authorize OpenClaw to read your gMail, OpenClaw has the credential."

I can only assume you are implying that the execution environment accessible by the model via the harness here, had access to the credential. This is not even broadly true, as there are many single click solutions for deploying gateways that will allow operators to tls inspect and replace secrets in flight, outside of the agent execution environment.

Sure, not doing that is poor practice- but your phrasing is unfair.

"the agent doesn't have to pick the tool at all. There is just one: the aclif CLI"

Okay, so- if thats the only tool, then why are we even talking about credentials? Why are we talking about openclaw? The whole conversation regarding creds being in bad places is predicated on agents having native control over a sandbox- generally through shell. If your use case lets you bake whatever resource access is needed into a single tool- then many other security layers bubble up in value, being that you no longer need to authn/z arbitrary networked calls.

Also, yea sure- there is "one tool", all you've done is abstracted the tools into arguments.

"Less agent inference the better."

Show me the data, then. Show me how this performs better than the alternatives. This sounds like all you've done here is reinvent progressive disclosure?

"The CLI holds the secret. If you deploy the CLI on a host or gateway, the agent never sees it."

Okay, so- brokering, again. How are you solving authz then?

My response was simplified because your question was basic. OpenClaw was one example that fit the pattern, not a claim that every deployment holds the credential in the sandbox. Injection proxies exist and I should have said so. As for showing the data for advantages, I'll refer you to Anthropic and Cloudflare's Code Mode

https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/code-execution-with-mc... https://blog.cloudflare.com/code-mode-mcp/

We have our own, but will defer to 3rd party evidence.

Reinventing progressive disclosure is definitely part of this, but that's only one element of the approach. To be clear, this is all based on what we use internally, deployed in a particular way within our platform. Will leave it up to others to determine how useful it may be for them.

As for authz, that's what the rest of our system does and is beyond the scope of the aclif effort.

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