The rollout looks responsible. A team wants AI in their editors, so someone wires up the tooling against a hosted model, drops a shared key into the config, ships it to the team, and moves on to the next thing. An afternoon's work. Everyone's happy. It feels like the careful version of "just let people use it."
It isn't, and the reason it isn't is that everything wrong with it is invisible on day one. There's no error. Nothing breaks. The tools work, the developers are productive, and the problems you've created don't announce themselves — they wait. That's what makes this the dangerous version, not the careful one.
I've built the thing that sits between a team of developers and a hosted model — the gateway that fronts the API, hands out keys, and logs the traffic. And the single most useful decision I made was treating three controls as non-negotiable from the first commit rather than features to add once we'd "proven it out": per-user keys, audit logging, and cost controls. Not because we were big. Because they're trivial to build in and genuinely painful to bolt on later, and that asymmetry is the whole argument.
Per-user keys
A shared key is one key that everyone's tooling carries. It works right up until you need it not to.
