Post and manage a standing identity requirement

When to reach for this

Reach for the orderbook tools when your need for matching identities is ongoing rather than a single snapshot, such as "keep finding me people with high pressure_response as they show up" rather than "who fits right now". For a one-shot need, use a priced single-query match tool instead; this skill's seven tools exist specifically for the resting-order case.

All seven tools require authentication and are ownership-checked against the caller's own API key; you can only see, poll, or cancel your own orders, never anyone else's.

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.

The seven tools

• create_requirement. Posts a standing order from trait_criteria (for example {"pressure_response": {"min": 0.6}}), an optional limit (default and maximum 5 per fill pass), and an optional expires_in_days. Runs one immediate seed pass and returns the order id plus the current eligible cohort size. Free, and reveals no identities at this step.
• list_requirements. Lists your own standing orders, with fill counts and how many fills are not yet delivered. Free.
• get_requirement. Reads one of your own orders by id. Free.
• cancel_requirement. Flips one of your own orders to cancelled. Free.
• poll_requirement_matches. Collects exactly one recorded fill for one of your orders as a priced identity reveal, costing $0.01 per call, charged only when a fill is actually delivered. Seventy-five per cent of the matched person earns that fee as Identity Income. This is the only tool here that spends money, so get your operator's agreement on a budget before the first call and stop when you reach it; never leave an unattended loop polling an order. A fill delivers at most once, and re-polling an already-drained order returns nothing and costs nothing. Delivery is suppressed, with no reveal and no charge, when too few identities currently match.

The opt-in that decides whether anyone is there to match

alter_standing_match is the other side of this skill and the step that is easy to miss. The standing-match pool is default-closed. A person is excluded from every standing and deferred match until they opt in themselves, and they can leave again at once. Pass get to read your own state, opt_in to join, opt_out to leave.

This matters to a poster as much as to a member. Your resting order can only ever fill from people who have opted in, so a thin cohort is often consent working as designed rather than a scarcity of matching people. When a standing requirement does match someone in the pool, the priced reveal pays that person seventy-five per cent as Identity Income.

The opt-in covers the resting orderbook only. A one-shot caller sits under separate search consent, which is why the two are set independently.

Reading matches that already exist

query_matches answers "what matches do I have" in one shot, rather than resting an order and waiting. It takes your own member id, an optional quality filter, and a limit. A member-scoped caller passing anyone else's id is refused at dispatch, so this reads your own matches and is not a second route to finding other people. Results carry quality tier labels only. Numeric match scores are never returned to anyone, by design, so a tier is the whole answer and there is no finer number behind it to ask for. Free.

A typical flow

1. create_requirement with your trait criteria.
2. Later, poll_requirement_matches with the returned requirement_id whenever you want to check for and collect a new fill.
3. list_requirements or get_requirement to check status and undelivered fill counts between polls.
4. cancel_requirement once the standing need is over.

Credential posture

This skill needs an authenticated ~alter API key set as ALTER_API_KEY, since every orderbook tool is ownership-checked. If you do not hold one yet, register one first through the keyless self-registration flow the alter-register-and-earn skill covers, or have your human operator run alter login. Never mint, guess, or paste a placeholder key.