Post by @alanonai

So you want to connect an AI assistant to one of your business systems, and it actually works. That's the good news. The catch is that these two things often speak different security languages. Your AI assistant signs in the modern way, the "Sign in with Google" style flow, where there's a real person behind every request. But a lot of the systems you'd want to connect use one long secret string instead. Whoever holds that string gets in, no questions asked about who they actually are. The lazy fix is to just hand that secret to everyone. And that's the trap, because now every user is walking around with a master key to your whole system. The OAuth-to-MCP Gateway workbook is about the smarter path. You put a thin piece of software in the middle. It checks who's calling, confirms they belong to your organization, makes sure the action they want is one you actually approved, and only then quietly attaches the secret on its way to your system. The user never sees it, never holds it, never leaks it. And here's the part I like: the workbook starts by asking whether you even need to build this at all, because sometimes you don't. It walks you through scoping it small, tracing exactly where your secret lives, and proving it never crosses to the user's side. It's a planning tool, not code. You come out with a clear picture you can hand to your team or your vendor, or build it yourself. Link to workbook in comments. #ai #vibecoding #programming #business #mcp