API key hell. Silent daemon failures. Claude bills that eat your margin. One guide, one evening, solved.
I built this guide because I kept seeing the same pain points in r/AI_Agents and r/aiagents. Every week, new builders hitting the same walls.
API keys scattered across .env files, Notes, clipboard history. One bad push and your key is public. No standardized way to share secrets between scripts, agents, and cron jobs.
Routing everything through Claude is like hiring a surgeon to flip burgers. Most monitoring, categorization, and draft tasks don't need GPT-4 level intelligence — they just need to run fast and free.
launchd daemons that die silently. Plists that work in testing, fail in production. No logs, no error messages, nothing — just a script that stopped running sometime last Tuesday.
Not theory. Working code you paste once.
One command to store any key. One command to retrieve it from any script, agent, or cron job. No plaintext files. No .env leaks. Works everywhere on your Mac.
Route cheap tasks to Llama 3.2 (free, runs offline). Save Claude for the decisions that matter. Includes the routing rules I use: what goes to Llama, what goes to Claude, why.
The exact plist template that works. The 3 mistakes that silently kill your daemon. How to debug ghost configs. How to reload after changes. Logs that actually show you what failed.
Built with exactly what's in this guide. All deployed in one evening.
Markdown guide + all scripts + launchd templates. You'll have everything deployed before you finish your coffee.
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