Law 5 · Secrets Dated for Death
Secrets live in the vault, fetched by rite, cached no longer than a day.
The Mossy Dekalogue · Law 5 of 14Secrets live in the vault, fetched by rite, cached no longer than a day. What is cached carries its date of death.
A secret's lifecycle has three stops: born in the vault, borrowed by rite, buried on a date. The dated comment is not housekeeping — it is the TTL the vault cannot see. Tonight proved both failure modes: fetching fresh every process cost a prompt per call, and a cached key without a date of death turned silently stale and began refusing. Date every loan; bury every cache.
A key without a funeral date outlives its trust. Bury what you borrow, on the day you borrow it.
Vaultone source of truth — no secrets in the repo, none in the shell history
Ritefetched by audited path, not by habit
CacheTTL in the comment — a dated line is a line that expires
Costfetch without cache: an auth prompt a process; cache without date: a key that 403s