PERSON + Snowflake OAuth（IS_AGENTIC = TRUE）: best way to connect agents

The article opens with the practical problem at NOWCAST: engineers run coding agents inside DevContainers rather than directly on local PCs and limit mounted credentials, but if the Snowflake credential handed to the agent belongs to a human, Snowflake still sees a human session. That leads to four concrete gaps: no agent identification, excessive inherited privileges, long-lived key pairs or PATs, and an inability to disable only the agent without stopping human work.

Agent Identity is described not as a single feature but as a group of capabilities built around one fact, whether a session is agent-initiated. Once Snowflake marks a session agent-active, that fact feeds into audit views, data-protection policies, and control limits. The article distinguishes delegated sessions (a user's session marked agent-active) from autonomous ones (a dedicated SERVICE_AGENT user), noting the outcome depends on which user the agent connects as, not on the agent type. A setup example shows a DevContainer-based Snowflake CLI obtaining a token through an agentic OAuth integration, with the session then recorded as EXTERNAL_AGENT and restricted from switching roles.