Translate With Your Own Provider Key

The plan → agent → apply round trip is the right shape when something else is doing the translating. If you just want the missing strings filled in, that is three commands and a file to shuttle around.

export OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-…
stringlane update .

It plans, translates, checks every translation against the same rules stringlane check applies, and writes them, all or nothing. This is not a shortcut past the gate; it is the same gate with the plan and the candidates kept in memory instead of on your disk.

The key is yours, and it is never stored#

update reads your key from the environment and nowhere else. It is not in stringlane.yaml, there is no ~/.stringlanerc, and nothing is written to a keychain, a config file, a log, or a plan.

For each provider, two variables are consulted in this order:

The StringLane-namespaced name wins when both are set, which is how you point stringlane at one account while the rest of your shell keeps using another.

A variable set to the empty string counts as not set. FOO= in a CI config is how a key gets accidentally unset, and treating it as present would send an empty token to your provider and report the resulting 401 as something else.

If no key is found, update stops before it reads your project: no plan, no model call, no file touched. The message names the two variables it looked for and neither value, because there are no values to name.

Choosing a provider and model#

stringlane update . --provider anthropic --model claude-haiku-4-5

Flags first, then STRINGLANE_AI_PROVIDER and STRINGLANE_AI_MODEL, then the provider's default.

A provider name it does not recognise is a refusal, not a fallback. Running the default for somebody who typed --provider opnai spends their money somewhere they did not name, and the typo would only surface in the bill.

For a local runner:

export STRINGLANE_AI_BASE_URL=http://localhost:11434/v1
stringlane update . --provider local --model llama3.2

Provider and model deliberately do not live in stringlane.yaml. That file is committed project intent, and two people on one repository legitimately use different providers: one has an Anthropic key, one runs Ollama locally. Committing one person's choice makes the other's run wrong.

It asks before it spends#

update is the only command that costs money, and tokens have no undo. So it asks first, and the question names what it is about to buy. Without a terminal to ask at it refuses rather than proceeding, unless you passed --yes up front.

Do not put --yes update in a CI job. A pipeline that translates on its own is a pipeline that commits work nobody read.

Narrowing the work#

stringlane update . --target de,fr

Only those locales are planned and translated, which is the cheap way to try it before running it across everything.

Keeping a record#

stringlane update . --out-dir ./l10n-audit

Writes the plan and the candidates it used alongside the run, so a translation you disagree with later can be traced to the exact input it was made from. Your key does not appear in any of it — there is a test that runs the shipped binary as a separate process with secrets in its environment and searches every byte of everything it produced.

When a run half-succeeds#

The write itself is all or nothing, so a failure part-way through leaves your files exactly as they were. What can happen is that the model returns fewer usable translations than were planned: some keys come back valid, others fail validation.

You are told which keys are still missing, by name, rather than being given a success message that quietly covers a partial result. Re-running plans afresh from the current state of the files, so it picks up exactly what is still outstanding and does not re-buy the work that already landed.