AI Features

Semantic indexing (embeddings)

Semantic search, related-thought suggestions, and clustering all rely on embeddings — numeric fingerprints of each thought's meaning. Turn on Automatic embeddings in Settings and Neural Garden indexes your thoughts in the background as your garden grows, re-clustering periodically. There's no manual 'Generate' step. It's off by default and needs a provider that supports embeddings — OpenAI (billed per request) or a local Ollama model. Claude can't produce embeddings, so the switch shows a warning until you pick a supported provider.

Command-K AI assistant

Press Cmd+K and type a natural language request to have AI act on your garden. You can create thoughts, connect nodes, nest and un-nest them, move and arrange nodes, duplicate a node (which places a linked reference — the same thought shown in two spots, kept in sync), create color regions and group nodes into them, edit properties, and ask questions — all through conversational prompts. AI understands commands like 'add rice inside dinner' (nesting), 'connect task under project' (edges), or 'make a Work region and move these into it'. It can also answer questions about your garden's content using garden intelligence. The assistant sees your whole canvas — every node and where it sits, all the connections between them, any color regions, and whatever you currently have selected (one node or several) — so requests like 'connect the two selected nodes' or 'what links these ideas?' work in context.

Exploring vs. doing — grow a tree of ideas

Open Cmd+K with nothing typed and a 'Suggested' section offers AI commands fitted to the moment — select a thought and you'll see things like Expand on '[its name]'; on a busy canvas, theme and connection suggestions; on an empty one, an invitation to map out a topic. Pick one to send it straight to the assistant. Cmd+K also reads your intent. For direct commands (create, edit, connect, rename, or a question) it just does the thing. But when you ask it to explore — 'explore [topic]', 'go deeper', 'what else', 'brainstorm', 'map out X', or 'expand this' on a selected node — it becomes a Socratic guide and grows a hierarchy tree on the canvas (like a skill tree, mind map, or learning path), one tier at a time. Shimmering placeholders fan out from the node the moment you ask, and the tier fills them in as suggested nodes — real, movable nodes drawn dashed and connected to the node by dotted edges. Direction carries the meaning, so edges stay unlabelled: expanding grows children downstream, while asking about what comes before — 'explore parents', 'what does this require', 'prerequisites' — grows the tree upstream instead, suggesting prerequisites and broader context as parents of the node. Keep one (✓, or just start editing it) and it becomes an ordinary thought; dismiss one (✕) and a fresh path grows in its place. Each suggestion is a short opening rather than a full explanation — usually a Socratic question, but the guide reads the branch and switches form when the moment calls for it: a concrete next action on a planning branch, a compact answer when a node poses a direct question, or a counterpoint when an assumption deserves a challenge. The guide leaves deeper levels unopened so there's always a frontier, slips in one unexpected branch you hadn't considered, and ends with a question pointing at what to open next. When a branch gets dense, it suggests drilling into it as its own sub-garden. There's no mode to turn on — this is just how the assistant works.

AI connection suggestions

The AI can analyze your thoughts and suggest connections between ideas that you might not have noticed. Use the sparkle button on a thought or open the garden intelligence panel to see AI-discovered relationships. Accept suggestions to create real connections.

Suggested nodes

AI suggestions are woven into the normal flow of adding thoughts. When you press + on a selected node — at any zoom level, from the full card to the compact view — the title input opens for your own idea while suggested nodes fan out from the node: real, movable nodes drawn with a dashed outline at every zoom level, each connected by a dotted edge. Direction is the meaning, so edges carry no labels: the + on the right grows the idea downstream (a next step, a contrasting angle, a surprise), while the + on the left grows the tree upstream — prerequisites, broader context, and hidden assumptions suggested as parents of the thought. Suggestions read the thought's whole neighborhood — the parent it grows out of, sibling branches (and what they collectively miss), children already explored, its typed properties, and your garden summary — and each picks the form the moment calls for: a Socratic question by default, a concrete action, a compact answer, or a counterpoint. They stay on the canvas, so you can arrange them, keep exploring, and decide later. Keep one with the ✓ (shown on the card at full zoom, and as a small ✓/✕ pill above the node when zoomed out — or simply rename it; editing a suggestion makes it yours) and it turns into an ordinary thought with a solid connection. Dismiss one (✕) and it disappears while a fresh suggestion grows in its place, so the branch keeps offering paths. Dismissals are remembered on that thought — across sessions and devices — so a rejected angle is never offered again, and every future suggestion (live or pre-thought) is generated knowing what you turned down. Until you keep them, suggestions are read-only sketches: the regular node tools (open as garden, edit, properties, +) stay hidden, they can't be nested into other thoughts or receive nested children, and they stay out of search, clustering, and your garden's intelligence — sketches in the margin, not part of your thinking yet. Occasionally a fourth, differently-tinted node appears below the fan, labeled Coach: instead of a topic suggestion, it's an observation about your thinking process itself — a branch running deep with no synthesis, siblings all taking the same angle, or drift away from your garden's stated goal — with a suggested move. The coach is deliberately rare, and it works best when you've written a Goal in the garden intelligence panel. Keep it and it becomes a regular note; dismiss it and it simply disappears (nothing replaces it).

Inside the suggestion prompt (what the AI is asked)

There's no mystery box — every expand sends one request built from context your garden gathers locally: your thought (title, content, type, and typed properties), its branch path from root to here, its neighbors labeled by relationship (the parent as a frame to fit, siblings as ground already covered, children as places to go deeper or diverge), other nearby thoughts, your garden goal quoted verbatim, the AI-maintained summary and tags, and everything you've previously dismissed on that thought. The ask itself is small and strict — which is why the suggestions feel consistent:

1. 1Propose exactly three openings playing distinct roles — a next step deeper along this path, an alternative angle unlike the existing children, and an adjacent surprise. (Expanding upstream flips the roles to: a prerequisite, a broader frame, a hidden assumption.)
2. 2Pick each suggestion's form to fit the moment — a Socratic question by default, a concrete action for doing-branches, a compact answer when your thought asks a direct question, a counterpoint for an unexamined assumption — and set the node type to match.
3. 3Stay small: 3–5 word titles like map labels, one-line bodies under ~15 words. Openings, never essays.
4. 4Never duplicate or rephrase anything on the branch, nearby, previously suggested, or dismissed — rejected angles stay rejected.
5. 5Finally, step back and assess the thinking itself against the garden goal; only when a clear signal appears (depth without synthesis, circling, goal drift) may ONE coach note be added. Most tiers get none.

Pre-think (instant suggestions)

Normally, pressing + means waiting a moment while the AI thinks. Pre-think removes that wait: turn it on in Settings (it's off by default) and Neural Garden quietly prepares the next three suggestions for your most recently touched frontier thoughts — leaves at the edge of your thinking — while the canvas is idle. The prepared suggestions are stored on the thought itself — simply selecting a prepared thought pops them out automatically (only ever from the cache; selection never triggers an AI call), and pressing + shows them instantly too. Unaccepted suggestions appear as compact chips packed in a neat column beside their thought, like the tree arrangement's child rows. The chips keep one readable screen size at every zoom level — zoomed out they don't shrink away like regular thoughts do — and the column re-arranges itself as you zoom or drag the parent, so a tier stays tidy on any screen, including mobile. Accepting one grows it into a full thought card. Suggestions stay tidy: a tier is visible only while its thought (or one of the suggestions) is selected — click elsewhere and it sinks away, reselect and it bubbles back, so exploring many branches never litters the canvas. Pre-think also thinks two steps ahead by default: each background pass drafts not just the next three suggestions but every suggestion's own next three, all in one AI call. That's why keeping a suggestion with ✓ feels instant — its children were already drafted alongside it and are handed down the moment you accept, ready to pop when you select your new thought. Behind the scenes the sweep immediately tops the accepted thought up to the full two levels again, so however deep you go, the garden stays one step ahead of you. (You can turn "Think two steps ahead" off in Settings to keep background calls smaller.) It's careful with your API budget: nothing regenerates unless the thought, its neighborhood, or your garden's goal or summary actually changed, and only a handful of recent thoughts (10 by default, adjustable) are prepared. Some places stay quiet automatically: Day entries, type definitions, and any garden on the Quiet gardens list in Settings (Inbox, Daily, and Types by default — edit the list to taste) never pre-think or pop suggestions on select, whether you're inside the garden or selecting its card on another canvas. The + button still works everywhere. If a prepared batch has gone stale, the + button simply falls back to a normal live request. You can watch pre-think work in the Agent Tasks panel: it shows the sweep in progress, which thoughts have suggestions ready (press + on those for instant results), and any failures — which retry on their own.

Clustering

AI groups your thoughts into clusters based on content similarity. With Automatic embeddings on, clustering refreshes on its own in the background; you can also open the clusters panel and run it manually. Clusters are color-coded and can be viewed as visual regions on the canvas. Clustering needs embeddings, so it requires OpenAI or Ollama.

Garden intelligence

The garden intelligence panel provides AI-generated summaries and insights about your entire garden. At the top sits the Goal field — your own statement of what this garden is for. Unlike the summary, the goal is yours alone: the AI never rewrites it, but it reads it everywhere — suggestions steer toward it, and the coach (see Suggested nodes) measures your progress against it. The summary is a rich-text field — generated summaries render with real headings and bullets, and you can edit them (or write your own) with the same editor used for thought descriptions. Whatever it says is fed to the AI as garden context, so keeping it accurate improves suggestions.

Privacy

Your API keys are stored locally in your browser — they never touch the server. When using Claude or OpenAI, thought content is sent to the provider's API for analysis. For maximum privacy, use Ollama to run AI entirely on your own machine.