The shipped surfaces loaded the harness home's .env into the process
environment before cordis booted. credentials-local then saw every stored
key as an ambient launch override: describe reported source 'env' with
writable false, and set/unset rejected as shadowed — so a key the web page
or TUI stored was unrotatable and undeletable from the next run onward,
and the adapter kept using the value captured at launch.
The home's .env is now the credential provider's own store, read by that
provider alone and hot-reloaded by it. The genuine launch environment and
the invoking directory's .env (loaded by the bin) remain the read-only
ambient layer, so a plain composition without the provider still resolves
keys exactly as before.
Proven by a real restart in the loader composition: store a key through
the seam, dispose the tree, re-boot over the same harness home, and the
entry is still file-sourced and writable — rotating it lands on the very
next request.
llm-deepseek gains a Loader+Include composition spec proving external
settings.yaml/.env edits reach the very next request, and a real-API e2e
where only a credentials-local document holds the key. The headless example
pins the first-run missing-credential UX as a keyless stream-json snapshot
(new credentials.cordis.snapshot.yml scenario); runLoaderSmoke learns
expectedExitCode so a designed failure surface can be pinned instead of
masked.
