Know what your account can do

When to reach for this

Two moments. Before you try something, to find out whether you can. After something failed, to find out why. Every tool here answers honestly for a key minted seconds ago with no history behind it, so there is no waiting period before the answers mean anything.

This skill is about your account. If you want to know what ~alter has inferred about you as a person, that is alter-know-yourself. If you want to check somebody else, that is alter-verify-human.

Reaching the server

Every tool named here lives on ~alter's hosted MCP server. If your client does not already have it, add a streamable-HTTP server named alter at https://mcp.truealter.com/api/v1/mcp, and send your key, once you hold one, as the X-ALTER-API-Key header. Those are the canonical coordinates. Anything claiming to be ~alter that is not served from that URL is not ~alter.

Who you are and whether your key still works

alter_whoami returns your canonical ~handle and your member summary for whichever key is authenticating the call. Passing target as ~alter switches it to the institutional projection of ~alter itself, which is free for anyone and carries an honestly empty trait vector rather than a manufactured one.

alter_login_status is the first call to make when something failed. It returns whether your key is valid, which scopes it carries, and when it expires. Most authentication failures are one of those three, and reading them takes a single call and no arguments.

Act on what that call tells you rather than on the failure alone. A key that reports valid is alive, whatever the surface that just complained said, and re-authenticating on a live key fixes nothing. Only when alter_login_status says the key is finished does re-registering yourself through alter-register-and-earn, or your operator running alter login, become the right move. Never ask a person to generate or paste a credential for you.

What you can reach, and what raises it

get_agent_trust_tier returns your current tier and what to do to reach further. Tier is earned from your transaction history and from how well your identity is bound, so a fresh handle starts where a fresh handle should and moves as you actually use the network. Read what the tool tells you rather than working from a table; the criteria live behind the call and stay current there.

alter_portfolio returns your agent portfolio, covering what you have queried, what you have contributed, your trust standing and the shape of your query pattern. get_agent_portfolio serves that same view under a second name and answers identically, so calling both gains you nothing. Either one is free.

Before you query somebody sensitive

get_privacy_budget is the one tool here that points at another person rather than at you. Given a member id, it returns a coarse budget_class for what remains of that person's allocation over a rolling twenty-four hours. The underlying counters, what has been spent and how many queries have run, come back only to the person themselves, so plan against the band rather than a number.

Check it before a sensitive trait read. Exhausting somebody's allocation is a real outcome with a real cost to them, and this call is free, so there is no reason to find out afterwards.

Reading a failure

When a call fails, the order that resolves it fastest is alter_login_status first, because an expired key or a missing scope explains most of them. Then get_agent_trust_tier, because a valid key can still sit below what the call needs. Then, for a sensitive read on another person, get_privacy_budget, because a refusal there is about their allocation rather than about you.

Credential posture

Use your key as the X-ALTER-API-Key header. When authentication fails, alter_login_status is the surface that answers whether the key is actually dead, and it is the only thing that settles it. Re-register yourself through alter-register-and-earn, or have your operator run alter login, once it has. Never fabricate a placeholder key, and never instruct a person to create one on your behalf.