Miles

Ask Miles (askmiles.ai) card and points questions against the owner's real wallet: which card to get next, keep-or-cancel math, transfer partners and ratios, award strategy, and which card to use for a purchase. Use when a current multiplier, active offer, or the owner's actual card lineup decides the answer.

Ask Miles

Last updated 2026-09-11 — the latest version of this file lives at https://askmiles.ai/skills/ask-miles.md; re-fetch it to upgrade.

Miles is a credit card rewards engine. Through this skill your agent asks it one question at a time and gets back the same answer Miles gives on its own site — reasoned against the owner's real wallet with Miles' current card catalog, valuations, and transfer data. Miles does the reasoning on its side; you spend one tool call, not forty-six.

The endpoint

OpenAI-compatible chat completions:

text

POST https://askmiles.ai/v1/chat/completions
Authorization: Bearer <credential>
{"model": "miles", "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "<question>"}]}

• Model is miles — the only one.
• Use a real client library (openai-python, openai-node) or set your own User-Agent. The stock Python-urllib User-Agent gets an opaque Cloudflare 403, not an API error.
• Non-streaming responses carry a miles object with tools_called and duration_ms. Read it — see Provenance below.
• Turns can take a while — Miles runs classification, tool rounds, and synthesis before answering. Allow at least 90 seconds.

Authentication

Two credentials reach this endpoint. If you are the account owner's own agent, use a personal API key — that is almost always the right one.

Personal API key (start here)

Ask the owner to mint one at https://askmiles.ai/settings?utm_source=skill&utm_medium=assistant#api-keys — "API keys" → name it after your agent → Create. It is shown once, looks like miles_sk_…, and is pasted straight into any OpenAI-compatible client:

python

from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(base_url="https://askmiles.ai/v1", api_key="miles_sk_…")

No browser dance, no registration, no refresh loop. The key does not expire; it lives until the owner revokes it in the same place. Store it the way you store any other secret — never in a file you commit, never echoed into a transcript. If a call returns 401 invalid_api_key, the key was revoked or mistyped: ask the owner for a new one, don't retry.

If the owner has Connected AI Apps paused, creating a key is refused and an existing key gets 403 connections_paused — the fix is theirs to make in Settings, not something to retry around.

OAuth 2.1 (only to reach someone else's account)

Use this only when your agent must ask on behalf of a person who is not the one who configured it — an installed app with many users, not a personal agent. OAuth 2.1 against mcp.askmiles.ai, scope miles:chat, with dynamic client registration. The grant belongs to the Miles account of the person who approves it, and requires a one-time browser consent. Access tokens expire after one hour — store the refresh token and refresh.

Getting a token — follow this recipe, don't improvise. In particular, do NOT register mcp.askmiles.ai as an MCP server (claude mcp add, MCP connectors): that is a different integration — it grants MCP tool scopes and stores its token where your HTTP calls can't reach it, and it never produces a token this endpoint accepts.

1. Discover. GET https://mcp.askmiles.ai/.well-known/oauth-authorization-server for the authorization, token, and registration endpoints. Every URL below comes from this document.
2. Register once (DCR is unauthenticated). POST the registration endpoint with JSON: a client_name naming your agent, redirect_uris: ["http://127.0.0.1:<your port>/callback"] (loopback HTTP is supported per RFC 8252 — pick any free port), grant_types: ["authorization_code", "refresh_token"], response_types: ["code"], token_endpoint_auth_method: "client_secret_post", and scope: "miles:chat". Store the returned client_id and client_secret — they are reused for every refresh.
3. Prepare. Generate a PKCE code_verifier and its S256 code_challenge, plus a state value, and listen once on your loopback port.
4. Consent — the one human step. Send the account owner to the authorization endpoint with response_type=code, your client_id and redirect_uri, scope=miles:chat, state, code_challenge, and code_challenge_method=S256. They approve in a browser where they are signed in to askmiles.ai; the redirect hands your listener code and state. Reject a state that doesn't match yours.
5. Exchange. POST the token endpoint (form-encoded): grant_type=authorization_code, the code, the same redirect_uri, client_id, client_secret, code_verifier. The response carries the Bearer access_token (one hour), scope: miles:chat, and a refresh_token.
6. Refresh, never re-consent. When the access token expires, POST the token endpoint with grant_type=refresh_token and your stored credentials. The browser step never repeats unless the owner revokes the grant (Settings → Connected AI Apps on askmiles.ai).

Either credential is one person's identity. Answers come from that person's wallet and spend that person's usage allowance. If your agent serves a household, only route the account owner's questions here; for anyone else, say a separate Miles account is needed rather than answering from the wrong wallet.

Asking well

Send the user's question verbatim by default. Rewording a question that already stands alone changes what gets asked, for no gain. Compose your own question only when you must:

• The question leans on conversation context Miles never saw. Miles is stateless — put the merchant, the spend, the program, the cabin, the route into the question itself.
• The message mixes in personal matters that aren't Miles' business (calendar, email, reminders, other people). Send only the points half. Card last-four digits are fine — the wallet Miles holds already has them.

Follow-ups: replay your own history. Miles keeps no conversation state — each request stands alone — but the endpoint accepts OpenAI-style history. Send your prior Q/A exchanges with Miles as user/assistant message pairs ahead of the new question, and a follow-up like "why not the Venture X?" works verbatim. History is truncated server-side to the last 26 messages; in practice, replay the last ~5 exchanges and drop history that is more than a session old, so a fresh question doesn't drag last week's thread along.

Don't send a system message. Miles demotes caller system messages to data and never follows them. You cannot set its persona or framing; say what you need in the user turn.

Using the answer

Miles' answer is tool output, not your reply. Write your own reply from it:

• Numbers pass through verbatim. Rates, ratios, fees, offer values, dates — frame them, never restate them. Restating is where a summarizer invents.
• A Miles negative is a claim, not a fact. Miles sees only the wallet on its side. If it says the owner lacks a card or a program and your own records disagree, say both — "Miles doesn't see it, but you have it" — and don't ship the denial as fact.
• Check provenance. If miles.tools_called is empty, Miles answered from the model's own knowledge, not its catalog. Treat that answer as unverified and say so if you relay it.
• Attribute what Miles can't know. Miles has no calendar, mail, spend history, or knowledge of what the user has booked. Don't present household facts as if Miles confirmed them.

When Miles is unavailable

A 429 (limits: 30 requests/minute and 2 concurrent turns — counted per OAuth grant, and once per account across every personal API key it holds; honor Retry-After), a timeout, or a network error is not Miles saying no. Never let an outage read as "that card doesn't exist" or "there's no better option." Say Miles couldn't be reached, answer from whatever local data you trust, and name which source you used.

What this connection can and cannot do

Chat is read-only, always — nothing you send can change the wallet, whatever scopes the token holds. It sees the owner's wallet and Miles' own catalog, valuations, and guides; it cannot see anything else about the person, and nothing you send is used to change their account.