From AWS Key Leak to evnx: The Origin Story of a Developer's Safety Net

How an AWS key leak, years of .env frustrations, and a poorly formatted LLM prompt accidentally built a developer tool. Part 1: The Accident — An AWS Key Leak That Changed Everything Every developer has that story. The one they hesitate to tell in interviews, wince at in retrospectives, and quietly reference whenever someone asks why security tooling matters. This is mine. About a year ago, I was deep in a refactor of an Apache Airflow project at work — my first Airflow project, born from early-career learning and grown organically into a system with 10+ DAGs and a sprawling network of helper Python files. The project had been running for over a year. Scrapers, ETL tasks, one-off experiments that graduated to production — each added in its own folder, each with its own .env file. At the end of a long day of refactoring, I just wanted to save my work. No ceremony. A quick git add . , a commit, and a push. The project didn't have pre-commit hooks at the time. Within minutes, things start