Introducing MindMax — the workspace knowledge work never had

MindMax is a desktop workspace for knowledge work, on macOS and Windows. You open a folder you already have — PDFs, books, Word files, notes — and an AI agent reads, thinks and writes with you inside it. Every answer quotes the page it came from, and every edit it makes to your writing waits for you to accept it.

I built it because programmers have had a home for their work for decades, and the rest of us still do ours across five windows and a chat tab.

Why knowledge work needs its own workspace

A programmer opens a project folder in an editor, and everything is there: every file, a way to search all of them, a panel for the terminal, and now an AI that can read the whole repository and propose changes as diffs to review. Nobody codes by pasting files into a chat window. The editor is where the work lives.

People whose work is documents — analysts, researchers, students, consultants, writers — never got that. The PDFs are in one app, the notes in another, the draft in Word, and the AI in a browser tab that forgets everything when the conversation ends. You do the joining by hand: copy a paragraph out, paste an answer back, wonder where a sentence came from.

I want MindMax to be the VS Code of knowledge work. The folder is the project. The editor is where you write. The agent works across all of it, and its changes come back as something you review, not something that just happens to your files.

What the workspace looks like

If you have used a code editor, the layout will feel familiar.

• On the left, your folder. The file tree is the folder on your disk, with daily notes and canvases alongside it, and search across everything.
• In the middle, the file — as itself. A PDF opens as a PDF, a book as a book, a Word file as a document, slides as slides. Notes open in a Markdown editor good enough to use on its own — more on that below. Tabs, as many as you need.
• On the right, the agent. It already sees the folder. Ask about the open file, @ another file or a whole folder, select a passage or box a chart and ask about only that.

Folder on the left, the file in the middle, the agent on the right.

Nothing is imported. Your notes stay plain Markdown, an Obsidian vault opens in place, and if you stop using MindMax the folder works exactly as it did before.

One report, start to finish

Features are easier to judge in a real job, so here is one. Say I owe my team a two-page report: should we change how we run our quarterly planning? In the folder are a dozen sources — two long industry studies as PDFs, a book chapter, the last two planning reviews in Word, and a page of my own notes.

Read: the long study, without skimming it

I open the longest study and tell the agent why I am reading it: to find the weak spots. It works through every chapter, leaving notes in the margin beside the passages they are about, and ends with a write-up of what is worth keeping and the strongest open question.

Then I ask across the folder: where do these sources disagree about how often plans should change? The answer comes back with numbered citations. Click one and it shows the exact words; click again and the PDF opens on that page with the sentence highlighted.

The quote in the answer is the sentence on the page.

This is the part that changes how much I trust an answer. The model can still be wrong. But checking it costs one click instead of a re-read, so I actually check.

Think: a map that grows itself

A report needs a position, not a pile of findings. I open a canvas beside the study, and instead of a blank mind map I get one already branched: the question it asks, its core claims, where it is disputed, the key concepts, with most lines citing the document. I dig into the branches that matter, and run a thinking model — a pre-mortem on my draft recommendation — on my own material instead of from memory.

The map starts with the branches you had not thought of.

Write: the plan is in the document, and it asks before it invents

In the chat I hand the report over: two pages for the team, from @sources and my notes, show me the outline first. What comes back is not prose. At the top of a new document is a brief — what the reader should agree with by the end, the angle, the voice — and under every heading a card with that section's point and the passage it rests on. I change the lines I disagree with, and that is what gets written.

Where the report needs something only I know — what actually happened in our last planning cycle — it does not make up a plausible sentence. It stops at that spot and asks.

A fact only you have becomes a question, not a guess.

When the draft is done it reads the whole thing through once, because section three could not see section seven. What it changed is listed with the reason, and each change can be undone.

Deliver: review its edits like a colleague's

I leave comments where the draft is thin or too confident, then ask it to revise from them. The edits come back marked on the text — deletions struck through, additions highlighted — in groups, each saying which comment it answers. Nothing is saved until I accept it.

Every AI edit, in every file type, goes through the same review.

Then I export to Word. The layout matches the screen, and each citation becomes a numbered source that names the document and keeps the quoted passage, so "where does that come from?" is already answered. If a colleague sends back their own .docx, the AI's edits land in that file as Word tracked changes.

The report stays in the folder as Markdown, next to the sources it came from. Next quarter it is part of the material the next one is written from. That loop — your folder feeds the work, and the work goes back into the folder — is the whole idea.

Three promises it keeps

• The folder is yours. Ordinary files on your own disk. No import, no proprietary store, no lock-in.
• Conclusions are checkable. Each quote is matched to the exact wording of its source; one that cannot be found there is flagged, not passed off as checked.
• You approve every edit. Selected sentence or whole document, Markdown or Word, the AI proposes and you decide. Accepted edits go into version history, so you can still step back.

Even without the AI, a notes app worth keeping

Say you never press an AI button. MindMax is still the editor I want for notes and documents, because it puts together the two things people usually have to choose between: Obsidian's files and Notion's feel.

• Like Obsidian, your notes are files. Every note is a plain Markdown file in your folder, in standard CommonMark and GitHub-flavoured Markdown. [[Links]] and backlinks, mentions not linked yet, daily notes, properties saved as ordinary YAML. An existing vault opens in place, and any other Markdown editor reads the same files.
• Like Notion, it writes like a document. Nothing to learn: press / for headings, to-dos, tables, callouts, code, maths or a diagram; drag any block by its handle; tables edit like tables and long lists fold. If you already know Markdown, typing # or > works too.
• And a few things on top. Every version of a note is kept, yours and the AI's. A note leaves as Word, PDF or image cards laid out the way you see it. And on the day you do want the AI, it works at the cursor, with its edits waiting as tracked changes.

Blocks from the / menu, plain Markdown on disk.

What it is not, to be fair to both: there are no Notion-style databases or shared team pages, no decade of community plugins, and no sync of our own — put the folder in a sync service you already use. More about the editor.

Also in the box

• Translate a PDF or a whole book, with a consistent glossary and a side-by-side view.
• Scanned PDFs made readable and searchable, page by page, when you ask for it.
• Voice and quick notes — say or type a thought as it comes, and it is filed into the note you have open or today's daily note, as a change you accept.
• Skills — reusable ways of working you can write, import and share, called with /.
• Writing styles from your own samples — show it a piece to write like, and save that as a style.
• Your own key, or a model on your machine. Every AI feature works with your own API key, and local models are supported.

What it costs, and what it is not

MindMax itself costs nothing: reading, editing, search and the folder never use credits. What you pay for is the AI's work — through a subscription, or with your own API key.

It is honest to say what it does not do:

• It is desktop only. macOS on Apple silicon and Windows 10 or later. No web version, no phone app.
• It is not a team tool. There is no real-time collaboration; you share files the way you already do.
• It is in public beta. It updates often, and some edges are still rough.
• The search is not a vector database. It finds things by structure and by the words on the page, which keeps every answer traceable — but a question worded very differently from your files can miss.

Try it

Download MindMax, point it at a folder you have been avoiding, and ask it the way you would ask a person. Then click a quote in the answer. That is the moment to decide whether to trust it.

I read every message that comes in, and the product changes weekly because of them. If something does not work the way you expected, tell me.

— Woodpeng

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See all features · Turn a stack of reports into a brief · Open your first folder · Download MindMax