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What we are building, and what we are not

· 3 min read
The MindMax team
The MindMax team
Building MindMax

MindMax is a desktop app for macOS and Windows that reads, thinks and writes with you inside a folder you already own. Answers about your documents carry verbatim quotes you can click back to the page, and every AI edit to your writing arrives as a tracked change you accept or reject.

There are a lot of tools now that will read a PDF and talk to you about it. We built a different shape of thing, and it is worth being clear about why.

The problem with a chat box over your files​

Uploading a document to an assistant works fine for a one-off question. It falls apart when the documents are something you come back to. The conversation ends, the annotations were never really there, and the summary you got is unfalsifiable — you cannot tell a good one from a plausible one without reading the source, which is what you were trying to avoid.

What we did instead​

Two commitments shape most of the product.

Your folder is the store. MindMax opens a folder you already own and writes ordinary files into it. No import, no conversion, no database. An existing Obsidian vault opens in place. If you uninstall, your work is exactly where it was. This costs us features — there is no web version, no realtime collaboration — and we think it is worth it.

Conclusions have to be checkable. Every claim an answer makes carries the verbatim quote it rests on, matched against the source text, clickable back to the page. Not "here is a document that supports this" but "here are the words, on this page". The point is not that the model is never wrong. The point is that checking costs a click instead of a re-read, which is the difference between a check you perform and one you do not.

What it is not​

  • Not a general assistant. It is about documents.
  • Not a team wiki or a database. If you want Notion, use Notion.
  • Not a mobile app. You do this work sitting down.

Where it is​

Public beta, moving fast. The app is free; you pay only for AI work — through a subscription, or with your own API key. The changelog has an RSS feed if you want to watch it develop.

Download it and point it at a folder you have been avoiding.