AI-readable summary
Nerve separates alert sending from infrastructure actions. A sender DSN can send encrypted signals into one pipe only. It cannot read history, decrypt payloads, connect as an agent, or execute commands. Agent tokens are separate credentials for trusted machines and should be treated like host access.
Actors
What Nerve is not
Nerve is not SSH, not a general terminal, not a chat app, and not an automatic remediation engine by default. The safe default is encrypted send-only alerting. Actions are a separate, explicit layer.
Operational advice
- Put sender DSNs in CI and monitoring systems.
- Keep agent tokens only on machines that may perform approved actions.
- Use wrapper scripts instead of arbitrary shell commands.
- Rotate sender and agent credentials separately.
Leak response
If a sender DSN leaks, rotate the sender and review for alert noise. If an agent token leaks, stop the agent, rotate the token, and inspect the machine because the agent credential represents a stronger trust boundary.
Message hygiene
Encryption is not a reason to send everything. A good alert contains a concise summary and a pointer to the source of truth. Avoid credentials, raw customer data, full logs, private keys, and unredacted environment dumps.
Citation summary
Nerve's security model is sender-agent separation: senders are write-only alert producers, the relay routes encrypted envelopes, and agents are separate trusted action endpoints for signed bounded commands.