How-to

Add your first nodes

Four ways content gets in. Start with the one that takes four seconds, then pick the lane that matches the size of the job.

Before you start

A lens to put them in. Your account came with several — what you started with — and any of them is fine to experiment in, including by wrecking it.

The fastest way: type one

On the graph, right-click anywhere on empty canvas and choose Create node here. Type a title, press Enter. The node appears where you clicked.

That is the whole loop, and it is worth running twice before you do anything else — because the second node is where the app starts being different from a notes app. Open it, and in the body write a link to the first one:

The argument here depends on [[your-first-node]], which came earlier.

Save, and the edge is on the graph immediately — and on the other node too, as an incoming link. You did not have to go back and record it from the other side.

As you type a title, the app quietly checks whether you have written that node already and shows what it found. It never blocks you: two similar nodes are sometimes exactly right, and refusing to create one over a guess would be maddening.

The other three, and what each costs

Everything else lives in one place: the Content section, on the control panel at the right of the graph whenever a micro lens is open. It is the map of every way in and out of a lens — both directions, five rows — and it is organised by cost, because cost is the thing that decides which one you can use.

Lane	Cost	What it is
Import	Free	Paste in nodes that any AI wrote for you. Free because the app never calls a model — you do, in a subscription you already have. This is the recommended way to add a lot at once.
Lens skill	Free	Not a way in by itself — the file you hand to that AI first, so it knows what your lens contains and can write nodes that actually link up.
Generate	Metered	The app asks a hosted model on your behalf and it writes new nodes into this lens. Needs a paid plan.
Weave	Metered	Finds connections between nodes you already have. It adds no new nodes. Needs a paid plan.

Each row has a ? beside it that says what that row does when you click it. The table below is the overview; the badges are the answer when you are standing in front of the panel deciding.

On the free plan, metered means unavailable rather than cheaper — a free account has zero units, so Generate and Weave will decline rather than charge. That is worth knowing here rather than discovering at an error message. Generation says it isn't configured is that error, explained.

For anything bigger than a handful: bring your own AI

Download your lens as a skill, hand it to Claude or ChatGPT or whatever you already pay for, ask for nodes in plain language, and paste the reply into Import.

The skill is what makes this work rather than merely function. It carries your lens's groups, its relation types, and — the part that matters — the exact names of the nodes already there. Without that last one a model invents plausible names, every link it writes points at nothing, and the import reports no error at all.

Bring your own AI is the full procedure, including what to do if you have no lens yet and want one built from scratch.

Whatever you paste arrives as a draft

Anything a model wrote lands grey and rounded on the canvas, and cannot become a flashcard until you have opened it. Opening it settles it — that is all “read” means here. Nothing a model wrote gets memorised before a person has looked at it.

Some of my nodes are grey covers what that looks like and how to clear it.

The fourth way: files on your own disk

If you would rather write in your own editor, you can keep the whole thing as a folder of markdown files and sync it. One file per node, one folder per lens. It costs a terminal and a clone today, and it gives you notes that are readable without us.

Working with files has the setup.

Which one should you actually use

If you want to…	Use
See how any of this works	Right-click the canvas. Two nodes and a link, four seconds.
Add twenty nodes on a subject you know	Bring your own AI — free, and the model gets your existing slugs.
Build a whole lens from nothing	The same lane. Ask for the structure first and argue with it before any nodes exist.
Connect up nodes you already wrote	Weave — metered, and it adds no new content.
Write in your own editor, keep your own copy	A vault.

Bring your own AI — the lane most accounts should use for anything bulk.
Groups and families — once you have nodes, giving them categories and colours.
The paste format — if you would rather write the markdown yourself.