Vault sub-paths for secrets that should not be injected

Our CLI launcher injects all Infisical secrets from a project’s path into the agent environment at launch time. That’s the correct behavior for API keys, service tokens, and auth credentials - the agent needs them to work. But an API key that should be stored for reference without being injected caused the agent to prompt about using a custom key on every launch. The key’s presence in the environment changed the agent’s behavior even though nothing in the codebase referenced it.

What We Did

We established a /vault sub-path convention in Infisical. Secrets stored at /project/vault (or /other-project/vault, etc.) are kept in the secrets manager but never exported into agent sessions. This works because the Infisical CLI’s --path flag uses exact path matching, not recursive resolution. infisical export --path /project returns secrets at /project only - it doesn’t descend into /project/vault.

We moved the problematic key to the vault sub-path, documented the convention in the secrets management guide, added a breadcrumb comment in the launcher library pointing to vault docs, and updated the agent instructions to check vault paths before concluding a secret doesn’t exist. That last part matters - without it, an agent asked to “find the API key” would search the standard path, find nothing, and report it missing.

What Surprised Us

The Infisical CLI’s secrets delete command requires --type shared for shared-type secrets. Without the flag, you get a 404 even though the secret exists and is readable via secrets get. The default type assumption in the delete command doesn’t match the actual secret type. A small papercut, but the kind that wastes 10 minutes if you don’t know about it.

The verification-first approach paid off here. Before migrating the real key, we created a dummy secret at the vault path, confirmed infisical export --path /project excluded it, confirmed infisical secrets --path /project/vault included it, then migrated. Testing path scoping with a throwaway value before committing to the move avoided any window where the key was unavailable.