The Check-In

The Check-In: Why five minutes a week/fortnigh/month could change everything.

Your login password is precious. It unlocks your whole account. It should be treated like a house key: typed carefully, remembered securely, changed occasionally, never casually reused.

But you don't use a house key every day. You live there, so you enter through the front door sometimes and not others. A daily, repeated credential — one you punch in hundreds of times — shouldn't carry the same weight.

That's why Agathon uses two completely separate credentials.

Your password (protected by two-factor authentication) is your master key. Change recipients. Add documents. Adjust your escalation plan. All behind this high-security credential, because you only need to access these features occasionally.

Your check-in PIN is different. It does one thing: tell Agathon "I'm alive, reset the clock." That's it. It can't view what you've uploaded. Can't change who gets what. Can't do anything else to your account, ever. It's designed to be something you can safely enter dozens of times without creating a security liability.

Why does this matter? Because check-ins need to be easy. If resetting the countdown required diving through two-factor authentication every single time, people would skip it, forget it, and eventually lose it. The whole system falls apart if the maintenance step is annoying. So we made the maintenance credential bulletproof (separate, narrow, one-purpose) and the powerful credential protected (password + 2FA).

Think of it like a house key versus a car key. You might lend your house key to a pet-sitter for a day. You'd never lend your car key to a pet-sitter, no matter the circumstance.