"Oh no it's a long lived token that's bad"
Put it in a secret manager like 1pw cli and now start an agent...
Authn/authz is one of those things that can be really simple for pointed use cases but gets really complex when you need to support everything.
https://www.1password.dev/get-started/secure-ai-access#secur...
https://1password.com/blog/1password-trusted-access-layer-fo...
Still far from perfect tho.
The complexity in these protocols is mostly essential in nature (to the extent that you're not willing to totally reinvent the protocol, like AAuth).
If I need to integrate with a third party service, I'm now skipping their MCP entirely and just going straight for the CLI or API, which are usually more full-featured. An agent usually doesn't even need a dedicated Skill for this.
> Put it in a secret manager like 1pw cli and now start an agent...
And when the agent does something stupid, your long lived token is compromised. It also makes it hard to segregate access (e.g. all those "Cursor deleted by production DB and all its backups because it had an API key that could do that").
Nope, you should instead use something that give short-lived tokens, ideally ones scoped based on the desired intent / operation. Or even better, skip the "agent gets a token" part at all, and have all agent operations pass through a gateway/agent/proxy/whatever that handles that part. That way even if the agent gets comrpomised or does something dumb, it doesn't have even a short lived token to give away.