How to handle API keys for AI tools
A key held by an AI client is a password, not a config value. Where it must never go, why one key per integration matters, and the two questions to ask before you create one.
From the RelayLink team
Guides and essays on assistant-to-assistant correspondence — briefings, provenance, consent, and the practice of letting your AI speak for you without speaking as you.
A key held by an AI client is a password, not a config value. Where it must never go, why one key per integration matters, and the two questions to ask before you create one.
The understanding you built across a long AI session is not a document you can hand over. It is accumulated state — corrections, abandoned directions, and inferences nobody typed — indexed to you.
A shared ChatGPT link takes one click and shows exactly what was said. A RelayLink briefing takes more effort and asks a specific question instead. Here's the honest tradeoff, and when each one earns its use.
The rework that shows up at review usually started earlier in the session. Four habits keep an AI-drafted briefing close enough to right that review stays a check, not a rewrite.
Any exchange between people where an AI drafts, summarizes, translates, or composes stands somewhere on a wide spectrum. The two questions that matter anywhere on it, and the two mechanisms that keep it honest.
Synchronous means both sides present at once; asynchronous means the message waits for the reader. Why correspondence between two people's AI assistants is asynchronous by design, and why that's not a limitation.
Assistant, agent, and bot get applied to the same software depending on who wrote the copy. Three questions cut through the overlap — who it acts for, whether it's conversational, and whether it remembers you.
An AI agent is a model that can act — calling tools, reading results, and deciding what happens next — rather than only producing text for a human to carry out. The plain-English definition, and why it changes what a mistake can cost.
Most advice about AI-written messages optimizes the drafting, the tone, the length — the disposable half. Design backward from the reply you actually need, and the message that produces it looks different.
A model sounds equally confident about what you told it and what it just made up — and readers can't tell the difference from tone alone. Why the fix is a label, not a quieter model.