I’ve been using this extension myself for a couple weeks now and it feels like a pretty significant upgrade to my development workflow, especially when working on integrations across multiple languages, so I thought it was worth showing you all.

envkey-vscode relies on EnvKey, an open-source, end-to-end encrypted configuration and secrets manager that is focused on security and ease-of-use. It’s cross-platform, can integrate with any language or host, and can be cloud-hosted or self-hosted. Getting a project integrated normally takes a couple minutes.

More on EnvKey: https://www.envkey.com

Building and testing it has been an interesting process, as I relied quite heavily on ChatGPT/GPT-4 to cover languages that I’m not very familiar with. It helped me to develop regexes to cover the common forms of environment access in each language, as well as to produce small test cases and Dockerfiles that can run them. While it took a lot of passes and tweaking to root out hallucinations and get each language right, I don’t think there’s any way I could have built a tool like this in a reasonable amount of time. Having a single `test` command that runs examples in dozens of languages is pretty amazing—sort of like a rudimentary version of Replit that runs locally.

All the code for the extension lives in EnvKey’s monorepo here: https://github.com/envkey/envkey/tree/main/public/sdks/tools...

I’m planning to write up a blog post on this process and what I’ve learned about how to get the most out of GPT on a polyglot coding project like this. If you’re interested, you can sign up to get notified here when this post is live: https://envkey.us15.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=623039cd8518...