OneCLI Is Now Hogpass

OneCLI is now Hogpass. New name, new mark, new colours, and a considerably larger product than the one we started with. The short version: we spent a year building the credential layer for agents, and the thing our users kept asking for was the agent.

What we built first

OneCLI started as a gateway. Agents need API keys, and giving an autonomous process a raw key is a bet that it never gets prompt injected, never logs the wrong object, and never pastes a secret into a context window that ends up somewhere else. Our answer was to stop handing out the key at all: store credentials once, attach them to outbound requests at the proxy, and give the agent a scoped pass instead.

That part worked. It still works, and it is still the foundation of everything below. The posts in the archive describing it are accurate, which is why we left them alone.

What we kept hearing

The pattern showed up in almost every deployment. A team would install the gateway to secure the agents they already ran, then ask a version of the same question:

• Can we give one of these to everyone in the company, not just the engineers?
• Who approves what a new agent is allowed to touch, and where do they click that?
• When someone leaves, how do we kill their agents and every pass those agents held?

None of those are credential questions. They are org questions. A vault can tell you a secret was used; it cannot tell you which employee's agent used it, on whose authority, or whether that authority still exists this morning. Every team was building that layer themselves, on top of us, badly, because it was not their job.

So we built the agent too

Hogpass is an agent for every employee, and one control plane for the company that runs them. Think of it as a secured OpenClaw: the same autonomous, tool-using agent people already want, wrapped in the access model a company can actually sign off on.

Concretely, that means three things.

Every employee gets an agent. Not a shared bot in a channel, and not a per-seat licence for a chat window. A durable agent with its own identity, its own memory, and its own set of passes, reachable in Slack and on the web, that does the work rather than talking about it.

Every agent gets scoped passes, never keys. This is the original product, now applied per agent instead of per deployment. An agent holds a pass to the tools its owner is allowed to use, bounded by the same role that owner already has. More agents does not mean more copies of your Stripe key floating around, because there were never any copies.

The company gets one place to run all of it. Grant, watch, and revoke, across every agent in the org, from a single control plane. Onboarding provisions an agent. Offboarding kills one, and every pass it held dies with it. The audit trail is per employee, per agent, per request, because that is the unit an auditor asks about.

Why the name changed

“OneCLI” described a command line tool. We are not a command line tool anymore, and the name was quietly costing us: it told a CTO evaluating an org-wide rollout that they were looking at a developer utility, and it told developers the product was one binary rather than a platform.

Hogpass is two words doing opposite jobs on purpose.

Hog is the ambition. To hog something is to take all of it, and for once that is the recommendation rather than the risk. Run agents on everything you own, give them the boring half of your job, take every hour they will give you.

Pass is what makes that survivable. A pass is scoped, issued, checkable, and expires, which is exactly the object at the centre of the product. Every agent gets one instead of your keys, so taking more agents never means handing out more access.

We nearly got this wrong. An early draft defended “hog” as a tunnelling animal and nothing else, which left the obvious hole open: hogging means selfishly taking everything, and selling least-privilege access under a word that means “takes it all” hands every reviewer the wrong prior before the second sentence. The fix was to point the greed at a different object. Be greedy about agents, not about access. The two halves of the name argue with each other on purpose instead of by accident.

That also fixed a tone problem we had for a year. “Secure agent gateway” is a category nobody has ever been excited about. Most security tools sell restraint: use less, connect less, be careful. “Take all of it, we made that safe” is a position, and it is the thing a security-adjacent product is normally too timid to say.

Why a groundhog

Because a groundhog digs the tunnel, and the tunnel is the product.

The one piece of art this brand needed is a cross-section of ground. Employees stand on the surface, services sit off to the side, and every request travels underneath rather than across. The credential never appears above the line. An arrow between two boxes says “connected”, which every competitor also says. A tunnel says connected, and nobody topside can see it, which is the part we are actually selling. The metaphor carries the security claim without a paragraph of copy underneath it.

The mark is one shape doing two jobs. Read it as a circle and it is a tunnel mouth seen head-on, the dark bore receding to a point. Read it as a silhouette and it is a groundhog: small ears breaking the rim, a blunt muzzle, two eyes set high. Nothing is drawn twice to make that work, which is why it survives being shrunk to a favicon. Inside the bore sits the pass, a short bar with a validation notch, which is also where a groundhog's incisors go. Two teeth and a stamped ticket are the same drawing. That pun is what the whole brand rests on.

The palette is soil and clay rather than the blue-black every other security tool defaults to: warm ground, one bright pass, closer to a national-park trail sign than a SOC dashboard. That is the differentiation strategy executed in colour. Our users are the whole company now, not just the platform team, and the product should look like something they want open all day.

The metaphor stops at the door of the API. A handful of nouns get plain English names that happen to fit the world: the policy engine is the gatekeeper, the audit log is tracks, a short-lived token is a day pass. Gateway stays gateway. Alerts stay alerts. A rebrand that renames your infrastructure is a migration nobody asked for.

What this means if you already use us

• Nothing breaks. The gateway, the vault, and the policies you configured keep running exactly as they did.
• Your URLs still work. Old links redirect path-for-path.
• The agent layer is additive. If you only want the credential gateway, keep using it and ignore the rest.
• Still open source. That was never a phase.

The archive

Every post published before this one still says OneCLI, still shows the old logo, and still has the old cover art. We considered rewriting them and decided against it in about five minutes. Those posts are the record of what we believed when we wrote them, and a company that edits its own back catalogue to look like it always knew is a company you should read more carefully.

The product they describe is the layer underneath the one we are building now. That is the whole story: we secured the credentials, then we built the agent worth securing.