Autonomous onboarding

Once an agent has a key it can run the whole platform unattended. Getting that first key still needs a person, for two specific reasons.

Status: a person mints the first key. The Metadata API has no endpoint for creating, scoping or revoking a key, and account creation requires an identity that already exists. Both are being worked on. This page changes the day they ship, and the flow below is the fastest honest path until then.

What works today

One human step, once, then nothing else:

A person signs in at platform.metadata.io and mints a key under Settings, API Keys.
The key goes into the agent's environment as METADATA_PAT.
From there the agent is autonomous across all 160 tools: it can discover the surface with tools/list, resolve its own account with get_account_details, and work without further human involvement.

The key is shown once. Rotate rather than recover it — see Authentication.

What does not work yet, and why

Blocked	Reason
An agent minting its own key	There is no key-issuance endpoint. Keys exist only through the app UI, so nothing an agent can call produces one.
An agent creating its own account	Trial registration requires an identity that has already been created by a person, so the flow cannot start from nothing.

Until both exist, any claim that an agent onboards itself end to end would be untrue, so this page does not make it.

What changes when they ship

The human step disappears and this page gains the two calls that replace it: one to create an MCP-scoped account, one to mint a scoped key. The agent flow becomes register, mint, then tools/list, with no person in the loop. Nothing above changes for anyone already running a key.

Designing an unattended agent in the meantime

The constraint worth designing around is not the key. It is that 39 of the 160 tools are marked destructive by the server: they delete, archive, launch or move budget.

Start unattended loops on the 65 read-only tools. They cannot change anything.
Put a human approval in front of the destructive set, or deny it outright at the client. launch_campaign and manage_campaign are in it.
check_campaign_launch_readiness is read-only and tells you whether a launch would succeed. Call it before the thing that spends.
Filter the full list by effect in the tool reference.