alt Hacker NewsThis is what agents are for. You load your private key into an agent so you don't have to enter your passphrase every time you use it. Agents are supposed to be hardened so that your private key can't be easily exfiltrated from them. You can then configure `ssh` to pass requests through the agent.
There are lots of agents out there, from the basic `ssh-agent`, to `ssh-agent` integrated with the MacOS keychain (which automatically unlocks when you log in), to 1Password (which is quite nice!).
This is a good defense for malware that only has read access to the filesystem or a stolen hard drive scenario without disk encryption, but does nothing against the compromised dev machine scenario.