AI mind map
An AI mind map for exploring, thinking and writing.
On your own, you keep circling the same two or three angles. Put a question in the middle and it opens out in several directions at once — including ones you would not have tried. Each branch is a path with its reasons: follow the ones that pull you, and dig into any line.
- Starts from
- A question, a document or a chat
- Methods
- 44 built-in skills
- Runs on
- macOS (Apple silicon) · Windows
- Price
- Free app · AI plans from $10/mo, or your own key
- AI
- Included, or your own API key
Thinking in a chat window, ideas get lost. Ask a second question and the first answer scrolls out of sight. Follow one idea five replies deep and you forget the other ideas you meant to try.
A mind map keeps everything in view — but you have to fill it in yourself. Most people reach for the same three or four directions every time, so the map ends up holding what you were already going to think.
This canvas does both. Everything stays laid out side by side, and the AI fills in the branches, including the ones you would not have thought of. You decide which to keep.
One question, spread out
The board in the screenshots on this page, from the question to the cut. The card names and sentences below are what came back.
A real situation, one constraint
“How can an open-source project with no marketing budget find its first 100 users?” — specific enough that the branches have something to push against.
Brainstorm spreads it four ways
Find the Need, Earn Distribution, Counterintuitive Bets, Turn Users Into Allies — each a card of five directions, not a keyword.
The hub says what they add up to
“Trust Before Reach”: the first 100 users are earned by solving a recurring, narrow problem, not by launch-day attention — and the real tension is between chasing reach and building a small, devoted cohort.
One line gets dug into
“Say no to broad feature requests early” opens into a card of its own, with a trail back to the branch it came from. It is the kind of direction you would not have listed yourself.
Then the cut
Keep the two branches that changed your mind, delete the rest, and drag the survivors into an order. Take them out as an outline or a note — or close the board knowing what to try first.
Start from a question, a document or a conversation
The centre card is where the quality of everything downstream is decided.
- A question you are stuck on, a claim you want to test, a plan you suspect is too comfortable — or a paper, a report, a passage you selected, or a conversation you want to keep going.
- Point the card at documents in your folder and the branches are worked out from their actual text, so what comes back is specific enough to argue with rather than a pile of plausible generalities.
- An empty centre card offers examples of how to ask. They all follow the same pattern — a real situation plus one constraint — because “artificial intelligence” spreads into platitudes and “how could a five-person team stop losing hours to weekly status reports?” spreads into something you can use.
Branches that are arguments, not keywords
A node that fits only a label cannot hold a thought. So every branch here is a card.
- Each branch arrives as a card with its own short list — a direction and the reasons it is worth taking — so you can disagree with a branch rather than just look at it.
- The lines are positions, not topics. “Aim for 20 devoted users before 100 signups” is something you can argue with; “community” would only have been a label.
A hub card that says what the branches add up to
Four branches side by side are still four separate lists. The hub is the card that reads them against each other.
- As soon as a question has more than one branch, a hub card sits between the centre and the branches, written in the same pass as they are.
- It names the sharpest tension between them and how it might be resolved — here, reach against a small devoted cohort, resolved by using the first to recruit the second.
- It is the card to read first, and usually the one that tells you which branch to open next.
Every line is a place to dig
The card is how the map is laid out. The line is what you actually work with.
- Any single line on a card can be explained, questioned, or have a skill put on it — so you follow the one point that caught you, not the whole card it happens to sit on.
- Or expand a whole card, and it becomes the centre of its own cluster. Depth comes from repeating the move, not from writing a longer prompt.
- What grows from a line carries a trail back to it, so five layers down you still know which branch and which point you came from.
- Every card has its own follow-up box: ask there, and the answer grows beside that card rather than at the bottom of a conversation.
- Not sure where to go next? Open the suggestions on a card and it proposes the questions worth asking from here — written only when you open them.
Diverge on purpose, not by habit
“Give me some ideas” produces the median idea five times. Spreading a problem out well is a method, and there are several.
- Brainstorm spreads the subject along dimensions that genuinely differ — the user’s view, the cost structure, the time scale, the failure modes — and always gives one branch to the counterintuitive direction.
- SCAMPER puts an idea you already have through seven kinds of change; six thinking hats looks at one issue from six fixed stances — and the rest of the diverge group is a click away.
- When the map has spread far enough, the converging skills pull it back in: key takeaways that hold up, or a writing outline you can start from.
Keep what holds up, and take it somewhere
A brainstorm that dead-ends in a pretty diagram has wasted your afternoon. What survives the cut has somewhere to go — and sometimes where it goes is a decision you can now make.
- Hand any branch to the writing pipeline and it arrives as a ready-made outline — either keeping the order you arranged on the canvas, or letting the pipeline restructure it, which is a choice you make rather than one made for you.
- The skills you used travel with it, so a report can say which angles the analysis came from instead of presenting conclusions from nowhere. How visible that is, is a setting: invisible, woven in, or stated outright.
- It runs the other way too — open an outline you already have on the canvas, pull it apart, rearrange it, and send it back.
- Or take a branch out as a Markdown note in your folder, linked back to where it came from, or as an image. The board itself stays in your folder for when you come back to it.
The rest of what is on it
Every card is yours to edit
Rewrite, merge, delete or write cards from scratch. Nothing is off-limits because a model produced it.
Re-running keeps the old version
Ask for another pass and you get a second copy beside the first, with the previous one kept as the baseline. It never overwrites the thinking you already did.
The board is a file
A canvas is a file in your folder, and any branch can be exported as a note or an image.
Take a branch into the conversation
Add a branch to the chat and the assistant beside the board has it in view — ask about it, argue with it, or build on it without pasting anything across.
Turn a chat into a board
A conversation that went somewhere can be opened as a board, one card per exchange, so you can dig into the turn that mattered instead of scrolling back to it.
Watch it arrive
Cards fill in line by line as they are written, and while the model is still thinking the card shows how far it has got instead of an empty spinner.
Coming from a mind-mapping app: what changes, what stays
A classic mind map is a canvas you fill in yourself. Here is what changes when the branches come back filled in — and the rows where a drawing-first app still suits you better.
| Topic | A mind-mapping appWhere most people draw their maps today | In MindMax |
|---|---|---|
| Getting started | A blank centre node and your own first ideas. | A question, a claim or a document in the middle; the first branches come back filled in. |
| What a node holds | A word or a short label. | A card with a short argument — a direction and the reasons it is worth taking. Denser than a keyword map: better for reasoning something through, worse for a one-page overview of a topic. |
| Going deeper | You think of every sub-branch yourself. | Any single line can be explained, questioned or grown into a cluster of its own. |
| Methods | Frameworks you apply by hand. | Built-in skills — SCAMPER, six thinking hats and more — run on a card for you. |
| Afterwards | Export an image or an outline. | Export as an image or Markdown — or hand a branch to the writing pipeline as an outline to draft from. |
| Drawing and styling | Free placement, shapes, colours and themes. | A stable automatic layout, no freehand drawing and no arbitrary shapes. For pixel control over a figure you will publish, use a drawing tool. |
| Arranging by hand | You place nodes yourself, or let an auto-layout place all of them. | Drag cards wherever you like and new cards grow around them. Tidy layout rearranges the whole board, so pin the cards that must stay put — they keep a small pin and can still be edited and dragged, and a tidy you did not want is one undo away. |
| Working together | Often shared, live boards. | One person, on the desktop. The board is a file in your folder. |
One part of a loop: read, think, write
Your notes, and the two hundred PDFs you read to write them, sit in one folder — where a single AI works across both. Tools you would otherwise stitch together each hold one half of that.
- ReadPoint the centre card at a paper or a report in your folder and the branches are worked out from its text. Reading a book? Its map grows beside it.
- ThinkThis pageSpread the question out, cut what does not hold up, and arrange what survives into an order that argues.
- WriteHand a branch to the writing pipeline and it arrives as an outline you approve before drafting starts.
Where it gets hard
- A sharp question in, a hard cut out
A brainstorm on “how do I grow the business” produces vague directions for a vague plan, and no skill downstream can fix that. And once the map has spread, the value is in what you delete — keep everything and you have generated volume, not insight.
- Wide expansions cost credits
One expansion on one card is cheap. Expanding every branch of every cluster because it is fun to watch is not — and the third layer is usually where the returns stop.
- The folder is off by default here
Unlike reading and writing, a canvas does not draw on your whole knowledge base unless you switch it on for that board. That is deliberate — a divergence pass anchored to what you already concluded produces more of what you already concluded — but it does mean a branch is only as grounded as the material you pointed the card at.
Common questions
What is an AI mind map?
An ordinary mind map is a spatial layout you fill in yourself, so it can only ever contain what you already thought of. An AI mind map fills the branches in: you put a question, a claim or a document in the middle, choose how to spread it out, and each branch comes back as a card holding a short argument. The layout is still the point, because seeing every angle at once is what a chat transcript cannot give you.
How is this different from asking a chatbot for ideas?
A chatbot gives you a list, and the next question scrolls it away. Here the ideas stay laid out side by side, a hub card says what they add up to, any single line can be explained, questioned or pushed further on its own, the ones you do not want can be deleted, and the survivors can be dragged into an order and handed to the writing pipeline as an outline.
Can it brainstorm from my own documents?
Yes. Point the centre card at a paper, a report or a set of notes in your folder and the branches are worked out from their text rather than from a topic name, which is what makes them specific enough to argue with.
Does anything come out of it, or is it just a diagram?
A branch can be handed to the writing pipeline as a ready-made outline, saved as a Markdown note in your folder, or exported as an image. An outline you already have can also be opened on the canvas and rearranged.
Will tidying the layout undo the way I arranged the cards?
Not the cards you pin. Cards you dragged are left alone while new cards grow, but Tidy layout is a request to rearrange, so it moves them too. A pinned card is never moved by a layout, Tidy layout included, though you can still edit it and drag it yourself. Pinned cards show a small pin, and the notice after a tidy has an Undo button.
Does the canvas use my whole folder?
Not by default. A board works on what you put on it, and the rest of your folder joins only when you switch it on for that board — because a brainstorm anchored to what you already concluded produces more of what you already concluded.
See also
The full set of methods — critique, structure, decide, learn — and how to stack them on a hard problem.
The canvas beside a paper or a book, starting from the passage that made you stop.
Options on one ruler, what each gives up, and the premises the comparison rests on.
Where a branch goes once you have decided it is worth writing up.
Where the half-thoughts are caught and filed before they are worth a canvas.
Copy a built-in method and change it, or write down one of your own.
The step-by-step guide: from the centre card to a note or an outline.
The definition on its own — and where mind maps stop working.