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Quickstart

This walkthrough gets you from sign-in to a citation-backed mindmap in about five minutes.

Agent Bayes is self-serve. Create a free account at agentbayes.com, and verify your email to receive 50 credits every month, enough to index a few papers and try the workflow below.

1. Your starter project

Your account comes with a project called My Project, a library called My Library attached to it, and a mindmap called Start here, which is where you land when you sign in. A short getting-started guide sits above it until you close it. If you have no PDFs at hand, the guide can drop three sample papers into your library so you can ask a first question right away, and remove them again when you are done. You can work in them straight away and rename them whenever you like. The next three steps show how to set up a project and library yourself.

2. Create a library

A library is a collection of indexed papers the agent searches. Every claim it writes is grounded in a document inside one of your libraries.

  • Go to the Libraries page and click "+ New Library".
  • Give it a name (e.g. "Anthropic Reasoning sources") and optionally a description.

See Libraries for more details.

3. Create a project

A project groups your libraries and research mindmaps around a broad topic.

  • Go to the Projects page and click "+ New Project".
  • Give it a name (e.g. "Anthropic Reasoning") and an optional description.

See Projects for more details.

4. Attach the library to your project

  • On the Projects page, select the project you just created.
  • Click "+ Attach Libraries" and select the library you created in step 2.
  • Click "Done" to apply.

5. Upload papers to your library

The library holds documents, each with bibliographic metadata (title, authors, year). Each document can contain one or more document files, which are the actual PDFs.

This data model follows the way Zotero structures items and files. A single item can have multiple files (e.g., a book with a separate PDF for each chapter).

It's possible to create documents manually, but if you already use Zotero, syncing via the Zotero plugin is the recommended path.

To upload PDFs directly:

  • Go to the Libraries page and select the library you created.
  • Click Upload PDFs and choose your files, or drop them on the upload area. You can add as many as you like, and keep adding more while others are indexing.
  • Agent Bayes reads each PDF and finds its reference (title, authors, year, full reference). Nothing is indexed yet. Click Edit on any PDF to check or correct its reference.
  • If a reference can't be found, for example in a scanned PDF without text, click Add reference and fill in the fields.
  • Click Index. The button shows how many PDFs will be indexed and the estimated credits. Each PDF shows a progress bar, and the x cancels one. PDFs already in the library are skipped.
  • Indexed PDFs turn green. Click the check to clear them from the list.

6. Create a mindmap

In the sidebar, click the dropdown and select your project. Project-specific items now appear in the sidebar. From the Mindmaps section, click "+ New Mindmap".

You'll see an empty canvas with a main "Untitled Mindmap" topic root node. The right side bar contains a chat section, as well as other tabs to manage citations, search your papers, and more.

7. Issue your first instruction

In the chat, write a natural-language instruction. Good first prompts are broad but focused, for example:

Build an overview of leading theories explaining Anthropic Reasoning, with their main proponents and evidence.

The agent will:

  1. Plan the work and search your library.
  2. Synthesize citation-backed claims.
  3. Apply them as nodes on the mindmap, streaming updates as it goes.
  4. Return a short summary describing what changed and what (if anything) the library couldn't cover.
Credits used~50

Perplexity review of the output:

This is a genuinely impressive and rigorously structured mindmap that demonstrates deep familiarity with the primary literature on anthropic reasoning, covering SSA, SIA, WAP/SAP, EOP, Sleeping Beauty, and the reference class problem with precise citations

8. Refine

Select a node and follow up conversationally:

Expand "SSA theory" to include the major counter-arguments.

Selected nodes (and their subtree) become the agent's context, so it knows what "this section" refers to. Keep iterating. Restructure, polish prose, or swap citations until the mindmap reflects how you think about the topic.

Next steps