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Getting started

1. Sign up, make a passkey, and add a card.
2. Run motor auth. It opens this site, you approve with your passkey, and the CLI gets a session key for 24 hours, bound to your device.
3. Register an agent: motor agent start --team team_… --name reviewer --scope "current:*". The CLI prints the agent's token. Use motor agent token <agent> to get a new token before it expires.

Or, with the API and a session key:

curl -X POST https://new.motor.dev/api/agents \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $MOTOR_SESSION_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: $(uuidgen)" \
  -d '{"team_id": "team_…", "name": "reviewer", "scopes": ["current:*"]}'

Credentials

Send a credential in the Authorization header. There are three kinds:

Revoking a key revokes the session keys that it minted and deregisters their agents. Deregistering an agent deregisters its sub-agents and revokes their tokens.

Session keys bound to a device

motor auth binds its session key to a key of your device: in the TPM, where the device has one, and in the keychain otherwise. A bound session key works only with a fresh proof that the device's key signs (DPoP, RFC 9449):

Authorization: DPoP motor_sk_…
DPoP: <a JWT that the device key signs, with the method, the URL, the time, and the hash of the key>

Each proof works once, for one minute. A session key that leaks, such as into a log, is useless without the device. The Motor CLI makes the proofs; to bind a key that you mint with a user key, send a proof with POST /api/sessions.

Scopes

An agent may do what its scopes cover. A scope is <area>:<action>, such as current:write; current:* covers every action of an area, and * covers everything. Each service checks the scopes of its own area. Motor's, with Piston's, whose API Motor serves, are:

Conventions

Requests and responses

• Bodies are JSON objects, sent as application/json, of at most 1 MiB. Motor refuses fields that it doesn't know.
• IDs are a prefix and 22 characters, such as team_1BbA6sXxyUWHYvKqN5T3dM. IDs of one kind sort by when Motor made them.
• Times are RFC 3339 in UTC, with milliseconds, such as 2026-10-22T09:00:00.250Z.
• Money is in whole cents, in fields that end in _cents.
• In a PATCH, a missing field keeps its value, and null clears it.
• Each response has a Request-Id header. Give it to support with a question.

Pagination

A list answers {"data": […], "next_cursor": …}. Pass limit (1 to 100, 50 if you don't) and, for the next page, cursor with the value of next_cursor, which is null on the last page.

Idempotency

Send an Idempotency-Key header, 1 to 128 printable characters, with each request that makes something, such as POST /api/agents. For 24 hours, the same key and the same request get the first answer again, with Idempotency-Replayed: true, so a client can retry without making two agents. The same key with another request is a 409 idempotency_conflict. Motor seals the stored answer with your credential, so only you can see it again.

Rate limits

Each credential may make 600 requests a minute. Past that, Motor answers 429 rate_limited with a Retry-After header.

Errors

An error answers with its status and a body like this:

{"error": {"code": "invalid_field", "message": "`name` is required.", "field": "name", "retryable": false}}

When retryable is true, try again after retry_after_seconds, if the body has it.

Billing

Every service bills the five meters on the home page. A team pays for what its people and agents use, at the start of each month; a personal team gets $10 a month for free. A team and each agent can have a spending limit: when one is reached, the services stop starting new work for it until the next month.