Most of what I read these days is about something new. A new model, a new agent, a new way to not write code. Fine. This post goes back to basics: a small tool that has been around for years and quietly removed a whole category of onboarding problems at work.

The tool is direnv.

The problem

Every project needs an environment to run. Default config, like which Vault to talk to or the log level. And secrets, like a database password. Before, everyone kept a local .env with all of that copied in by hand. It worked on day one. Then a password was rotated or a default changed, and your copy was quietly out of date. And since that file was full of real values, it was always one .gitignore slip away from a commit.