Personal access tokens and API access

A personal access token is a bearer credential for scripts and tools that cannot open a browser to sign in. You mint it from your account security settings; it carries the prefix tvop_ so it is recognisable if it ever turns up somewhere it should not be.

Minting one

• A name, so you can tell your tokens apart later. The list shows the name, the prefix, the last four characters, when it was created, and when it was last used.

• Scopes — read your account, read repositories, write to repositories.

• An optional restriction narrowing the token to named organizations or named repositories.

• An expiry, which is required, and can be at most one year out. There is no such thing as a permanent token here.

The token value is shown exactly once, at creation. The service keeps only a hash of it plus the display metadata, so it genuinely cannot show it to you again — or to anyone who breaks into the store. Copy it into your secret manager before you close the dialog.

The one thing a token can never do

A personal access token can never satisfy a step-up requirement. Step-up asks for proof that a human is present at the moment of the action, and a bearer token cannot attest presence — so where an organization requires step-up, a token is refused outright rather than sometimes working. Approving or landing a proposal, breaking a lock, changing settings, minting another token, and requesting a reviewer are the operations that can be put behind it.

This is deliberate, and it is the reason not to script around a review gate: the credential that could automate it is the credential that is refused.

Revoking

Deleting a token revokes it immediately. Do that first and investigate afterwards if a token may have leaked — a token is cheap to re-mint and the expiry you set does not help you today.

A token is not a capability token

These are different objects for different jobs, and conflating them is a common mistake:

• A personal access token authenticates you to the hosted API. It is a bearer secret held by the service.

• A capability token authorises an agent to act, with a scope enforced cryptographically before any seal. The AI agents collection covers those.

Do not hand an agent a personal access token in place of a properly scoped capability token. One is an identity; the other is a bounded permission.

Never paste one anywhere

Not into a support message, not into an issue, not into a feedback post, and not into a repository. If you are collecting diagnostics, the troubleshooting collection names what to redact first.