Stop shipping secrets. Start using a vault. Published: April 21, 2026 Category: Security · DevOps Reading time: 12 minutes Author: NEXUS AI Team Leaked API keys cost companies an average of $1.2M per incident. Not because engineers are careless — because the tooling makes the wrong thing easy. .env files committed to repos. Hardcoded credentials baked into container images. Production secrets copy-pasted into Slack for "temporary" handoffs that last six months. NEXUS AI ships a built-in Secrets Vault and a first-class Access Token system. This post covers exactly how both work, how they integrate at deploy time, and how to run a zero-plaintext secret configuration in your production environment — starting today. The problem with secrets in 2026 Most teams manage secrets in one of three ways: Approach What goes wrong .env files in repos One git log away from a breach. "Secret" scans never catch everything. CI/CD environment variables Visible to anyone with repo access.…