I’m sitting here shortly after noon, on my couch, watching a YouTube. I’m having thoughts on an essay, and feeling inspired to write.

My goal is this: brainstorm my thoughts for my blog.

My blog is written in text files inside a git repo, and published on GitHub using the Jekyll integration in their Pages .io domain.

On my iPad, I pull from the remote and see that I’m missing a draft. No worries, because I’m not wanting to work on that piece, but still, I feel like I could be better after I collect it in and don’t lose it.

So I ssh in and cd to the directory, see the missing draft file, stage and commit it. But then git push just seems to hang. A minute later, I realize that my laptop upstairs is likely halted on the 1password biometric prompt for my secured ssh key. Well, shoot. I don’t want to walk upstairs to auth TouchID.

Let’s see if I can use that fancy 1password-cli package I installed but haven’t learned a lot about. Okay, back to the command line, I type op -h and then it seems like my ssh has crashed? Open a new tab and reconnect, same here. Again, but just type a bunch of random… looks fine, why does op lock it up? Let’s see what’s on the GUI… Oh, macOS Security has flagged it as a new app, and I guess fish trys to run something (like the completions helper) after a moment.

I confirm the new app prompt. Okay, op help, op signin, feels halted. Ugh, the GUI has popped a TouchID again.

I ask GPT for help, and 4o immediatly halucinates a solution. Downvote the response and switch over to the o3 model. It does better, and I learn about set -x OP_BIOMETRIC_UNLOCK_ENABLED false. I write a little fish functions to avoid having to remember all this, and I’ve got ssh-add -l showing my keys in 1password. But of course, the ssh-agent config goes to the GUI client, and it’s insistance at biometics.

GPT o3 halucinates the command op account unlock and I downvote again. I manually search the docs, I’m not finding it. I come back and just reload o3’s attempt. It accepts the limitation and reiterates being at the affected computer. Ugh… Okay, ask if the op cli can function as an SSH-Agent itself, and it headlines the response with “Reality check” and says basically, no.

GOOD!

Okay, Ask GPT if I can feed an SSH key directly to git without writing to disk.

Then some time later, I have most of my cases handled for enabling and disabling the GUI ssh key agent (via config files) and locking up when I’m done.

I work in fish shell, so the key element was figuring out not to use ssh-agent -s as the LLM was infering from guides, but to use ssh-agent -c | source instead.

View the final result of my distraction here: 1password.fish.

Okay, what was I doing? Oh, it’s almost 6pm.