Do not touch my SSH private key!

Do not touch my SSH private key!
Photo by Radu Prodan / Unsplash

We had our first clash with Claude two days ago. I was installing coolify for a client on a hetzner machine, and was setting up a different machine (also on hetzner). During server creation I added my private key to this new machine as well, and asked claude to set up the server for me.

Everything went really well with the coolify setup, but then I saw it tried to SSH over from the coolify server to the other server... And it got rejected. It tried again, and then made up it's mind, and said: Ah, okay, then let's copy over Andy's private key, that will work... That was the moment it got a Cancel from my end, and I explained it: Never ever touch my private key again. :) We brainstormed a little bit, and claude realised he can use localhost to transfer the public key via localhost instead.