Operations
AI assistant and MCP
Last updated 2026-08-09T07:24:21+00:00
The Racinage assistant answers questions about your account access and supported features, understands the selected family, page, record, and current permissions, and can propose typed record changes for review.
Open the assistant
Use the sparkle button on a dashboard page. On desktop, the assistant is a permanent inline rail that narrows the page content instead of covering it. Trees places the button above the tree controls; other pages use a compact button on the assistant’s selected edge. Each page remembers its own open or closed state for your user account, including after reloads and on another device. Route navigation restores that state without an open or close animation. Narrow screens use a full-screen layer so the workspace remains usable.
You can also open Manage > Messages > New and choose Racinage AI to start a fresh private assistant conversation about your account or how Racinage works.
Choose the left or right edge from Manage > Settings > Personal preferences. Right is the default. Resize the open desktop rail by dragging its inner vertical edge or focus that edge and use the arrow keys. Side and width are saved to your user account.
The composer starts as a compact single field with a 100-pixel minimum height. Its text area fills the available field and grows upward as you type, up to 380 pixels, then scrolls for longer prompts. The Send action appears only when the field contains text.
Type @ followed by two or more characters to attach an accessible person, tree, event, project, media record, document, history record, plugin, or system feature. Racinage checks the current family and exact collaboration capabilities again when the prompt is submitted and before a read is performed.
The assistant is limited to Racinage account and feature support. It does not answer unrelated questions and has no internet search, browser, shell, raw SQL, arbitrary web request, super-admin, payment, or plan-entitlement tools.
Choose a provider explicitly
Open Manage > AI Features. Each family user chooses a default provider and model. Racinage never moves a failed prompt to another provider silently.
- Racinage AI: uses the tested provider and model selected by a super admin. Hosted Lite uses a personal allowance; paid-family allowances require an assigned funded seat.
- Hosted AI with BYOK: uses your encrypted provider key without consuming funded credits.
- Ollama: discovers local models from the native Ollama model endpoint.
- LM Studio: discovers and tests models through its OpenAI-compatible local server.
- Advanced local compatible: connects to a loopback-only OpenAI-compatible server.
First-class hosted setup is available for OpenAI, OpenRouter, DeepSeek, Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, xAI Grok, Mistral AI, GroqCloud, Together AI, Perplexity, and Cerebras Inference. Racinage uses each provider’s vetted OpenAI-compatible or native adapter, exact API host, credential header, model discovery endpoint, and privacy information. Super admins may add other reviewed public HTTPS providers.
Local endpoints must use localhost, 127.0.0.1, or ::1. Local prompts are not sent to a cloud provider as a fallback. A model must pass a structured tool round-trip before it can propose CRUD actions; writing-only models may still summarize and rewrite.
Super-admin provider and access controls
Open admin7839 > APIs & Connectors > AI Providers. Add or edit a vetted provider profile, select its adapter and exact HTTPS host, define its model and pricing policy, then add an encrypted system credential for the correct environment. Test the credential before selecting that profile as the system default. The default funded provider is used automatically for eligible hosted Lite users and eligible paid-family users unless they explicitly select BYOK or local AI.
Universal AI chat is the emergency platform gate. Paid-account AI access can disable or enable inherited Family, Max, and Lifetime access. Funded AI separately controls system-funded use, including the personal hosted Lite allowance. Lite credits can be set to zero independently under plan quotas. Disabling a credential stops new requests. Revoking it immediately destroys its stored ciphertext, but the provider-side key must still be revoked in that provider’s dashboard.
The same page includes User AI access overrides. Select one or more accounts, choose Enabled, Disabled, or Inherit, and add an optional private note. An explicit override takes precedence over the paid-account gate until it is changed back to Inherit, but it cannot bypass the Universal emergency gate. Each affected user receives the note through their enabled interface and email notification channels.
Credits and privacy
One funded credit represents USD $0.01 of actual model cost. Hosted Lite includes 20 personal credits each UTC month, shared by the user across every accessible family account. Family includes 50 monthly credits for each of up to 2 assigned users, Max includes 200 for each of up to 10, and Lifetime includes 500 for each of up to 5. Quotas reset on the first day of each UTC month; unused credits expire without rollover or proration.
When a Lite user also has a funded seat in a paid family, Racinage uses the personal Lite pool first if it can cover the complete estimated request, then the paid-family pool. A request is never split between pools. BYOK and local usage consume neither pool and never silently fall back to funded AI.
Racinage-funded paid-family usage stops when the paid period ends. BYOK and local models may continue during the normal 21-day record-access grace period. Racinage Free for Windows is a separate local app: it receives no hosted funded credits and remains local or BYOK based.
Chats and proposed tool arguments are encrypted. Usage monitoring records only minimized operational metadata such as provider, model, tokens, cost, latency, tool name, confirmation result, status, and a correlation identifier.
Review every change
Reads, explanations, navigation, highlighting, and searches do not need confirmation. Creates and edits show a preview with Apply. Bulk, relationship, archive, safe-setting, share, destructive, and public-impact actions require stronger confirmation and an impact summary.
Inline writing tools change only the local browser draft. Use the page’s normal Save action to commit the edited record.
Connect an external MCP client
External MCP is available to Family, Max, and Lifetime accounts when enabled for the rollout. Create a family-scoped personal access token from Manage > AI Features, or authorize an approved client through OAuth with PKCE. Tokens are scoped, expiring, revocable, and never grant access to another family.
The Streamable HTTP endpoint is https://racinage.com/mcp. Its only protocol is 2026-07-28: every request is self-contained, with no initialize handshake or Mcp-Session-Id. Send matching MCP-Protocol-Version, Mcp-Method, and, where required, Mcp-Name headers, plus the protocol version and client capabilities in params._meta. Clients may call server/discover to inspect supported versions and capabilities.
Call bootstrap_context before any account-bearing tool or resource. It returns an explicit, short-lived application context handle and revision for the authorized family and page. This is not a transport session: any web server instance can validate the handle from a later independent request. Reads and writes are rejected when the context is missing, expired, or stale.
Modern tool, prompt, and resource lists include deterministic cache hints. Account-specific results remain private and immediately stale; safe static catalogs may be cached briefly. OAuth authorization responses include their issuer for mix-up protection. Racinage accepts only 2026-07-28; clients that still require initialization or transport sessions must upgrade before connecting.
MCP exposes typed, permission-scoped family tools and minimized resources, not raw database access, code execution, internet search, browser or shell access, arbitrary web requests, super-admin functions, commerce changes, or private credential fields. Write tools remain phased separately from read-only access.
Racinage does not currently advertise the Tasks extension or multi-round-trip input requests. Those features will be enabled only when a reviewed long-running or external-write workflow needs them and the server can honor the full capability contract.
Published plugins may contribute reviewed mentions, minimized context, and typed tools through an optional manifest contract. Plugin tools remain scoped to the active installation and pass through the same permission, revision, idempotency, confirmation, and audit checks. A developer MCP endpoint is activated only through a reviewed adapter and exact tool allowlist.
Provider API billing and keys
Cloud AI providers manage API access and billing independently from consumer chat subscriptions. For example, a ChatGPT Pro subscription does not include OpenAI API usage. Create a restricted API key with the chosen provider, then store it only through the encrypted Racinage setup, never in source files or messages. OpenAI users can review its billing separation and API key safety.