Tokens, and the two kinds

Assistant tokens let an AI ask Retrixus questions. Operator keys let a person or a script administer Retrixus. They are deliberately not interchangeable.

Three different credentials are involved in a working setup, and it is worth being clear about which is which, because they protect different things.

Your assistant never sees your Recurly key. That is the point of the arrangement. The key lives in Google Secret Manager, is fetched at the moment a question is asked, and is used by Retrixus to call Recurly. It is never written to a database, never logged, and never included in an error message.

Assistant tokens

One per assistant. Mint one for Claude, another for ChatGPT, another for a colleague's setup — do not share a single token between them.

Separate tokens are worth the small extra effort for two reasons. The audit log records which token asked each question, so "who looked this customer up?" has an answer. And if one is exposed, you revoke that one and everything else keeps working.

A token is shown once, when you mint it. Retrixus keeps only a scrambled version — it genuinely cannot show it to you again, or to anyone who calls up claiming to be you. Lost one? Revoke it and mint another. Revocation takes effect immediately.

Some tokens are for a person at a chat window; others are for a system running unattended. Retrixus records the difference, along with which sites and which capabilities each token is allowed. In this version those limits have nothing to restrict — there are no write tools — but they are recorded from the start so that when writes arrive, the rules are already in place rather than being added afterwards.

Operator keys

An operator key administers Retrixus, not Recurly: adding sites, minting assistant tokens, reading the audit log.

Most people never need one. The console signs you in with Google or an emailed link, and that is the recommended path — it means you never handle a credential at all. Operator keys exist for scripts, for automated setups, and for people who prefer them.

They come in two levels: read-only administration, and full administration.

Why the prefixes are different

rtx_live_ for assistant tokens, rtx_op_live_ for operator keys. The difference is deliberate.

Paste an operator key into an assistant's connector settings and it fails at once, with a clear message. Had the two looked alike, it would have failed in some confusing way further along — or, far worse, not failed at all. It also means that if a credential ever leaks, anyone who finds it can tell what it opens, and so can we.

If a credential is exposed

An assistant token — revoke it in the console. Immediate, and nothing in Recurly is affected.

Your Recurly API key — use Rekey on the instance. The old key is destroyed and a new one takes over, with the alias, tokens and history intact.

An operator key — revoke it in the console. Other keys, including your own, keep working.

In all three cases the audit log survives. It has no delete path, so what happened before the revocation is still readable afterwards — which is exactly when you want it.