secrets-and-teardown-disciplinelisted

# Secrets, Least Privilege, Teardown, and Scope Ownership Make secrets — and identifying details — structurally impossible to commit, grant the narrowest privilege that works, always tear down the ephemeral infrastructure you stood up and verify it reached zero, and provision only inside the lifecycle you own. Prevention is structural — not a reviewer remembering to look. ## When to use Reach for this whenever you touch any of: - Credentials, API keys, tokens, connection strings, or `.env`-style config. - Identifying details of private infrastructure: hostnames, usernames, home paths, internal domains, non-public IPs — reconnaissance data, even when they unlock nothing. - Infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation, CDK, Bicep) — especially anything that grants IAM roles or creates secret containers. - Ephemeral or throwaway cloud environments spun up for a demo, test, or review. - Resources you create inside a project, account, or namespace someone else owns. Red-flag thoughts — if you catch yourself thinking any of these, STOP and apply this skill: - "I'll just paste the real value in for now and rotate it later." - "The reviewer will notice if a secret slips into the diff." - "Project-wide access is simpler than scoping it to one resource." - "`destroy` ran without errors, so it's all gone." - "I'll manage the whole project lifecycle since I'm already in here." - "It's only a quick test environment, the rules don't apply." ## The rule 1. **Gitignore s