IMHO there are a couple axis that are interesting in this space.

1. What do the tokens look like that you are you storing in the client? This could just be the secret (but encrypted), or you could design a whole granular authz system. It seems like tokenizer is the former and Formal is the latter. I think macaroons are an interesting choice here.

2. Is the MITM proxy transparent? Node, curl, etc allow you to specify a proxy as an environment variable, but if you're willing to mess with the certificate store than you can run arbitrary unmodified code. It seems like both Tokenizer and Formal are explicit proxies.

3. What proxy are you using, and where does it run? Depending on the authz scheme/token format you could run the proxy centrally, or locally as a "sidecar" for your dev container/sandbox.

We truly are living in the dumbest timeline aren’t we.

I was just having an argument with a high level manager 2 weeks ago about how we already have an outbound proxy that does this, but he insisted that a mitm proxy is not the same as fly.io “tokenizer”. See, that one tokanizes every request, ours just sets the Authorization header for service X. I tried to explain that it’s all mitm proxies altering the request, just for him to say “I don’t care about altering the request, we shouldn’t alter the request. We just need to tokenize the connection itself”