Use an API key

Hover normally rides the subscription you logged your CLI into (claude login, codex login). If you'd rather run on a model API key — no subscription login required — drop it into the widget and Hover passes it to the spawned CLI.

Where to set it

Open the widget's ⚙ settings and paste your key into Model API key. Leave it blank to keep using your CLI subscription.

The key maps to the active agent's environment variable:

How it's handled

• Stored in your browser only (localStorage), and sent over the local 127.0.0.1 WebSocket to the Hover service.
• The service holds it in memory and injects it into the spawned CLI's environment for that run. It is never written to disk, never logged, never put into a saved spec, never uploaded anywhere.
• It lives for the service's lifetime; the widget re-sends it on reconnect, so a service restart re-asserts it from your browser.

@hover-dev/core ships zero LLM SDK code — there is no model client inside Hover to send a key to in the first place. The key only ever reaches the CLI you already trust on your PATH.

CI is unaffected

This is an authoring-time convenience. The saved .spec.ts runs in CI with npx playwright test — no agent, no model, no key. Setting an API key here never wires one into CI.

You can also set the env var directly in the shell that runs your dev server (ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=… pnpm dev); the service picks it up as the default.