Why the two are easy to conflate
tCode's account login and a console.artfical.com API key are easy to conflate because they both ultimately reach the same underlying tAI models, but they solve two genuinely different problems.
tCode's account login is about you working interactively in your own terminal, with your own conversation history, memory, and connectors carried over automatically from the web app you already use.
An API key from console.artfical.com is about a program you wrote calling a model programmatically on its own, with its own usage and billing tracked separately from your personal account's plan.
| tCode account login | console.artfical.com API key | |
|---|---|---|
| For | You, working interactively | A program you wrote |
| Auth | Device-code sign-in | An API key |
| Billing | Your account plan | Tracked separately |
A simple test for which one a given situation actually needs: if a human is sitting at the keyboard reading the responses, it is the account login; if a program is calling the model and parsing the response itself with no person reading it turn by turn, it is an API key.