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Use caseThink

Brainstorm a product with your own AI agent

A canvas that grew in both directions — branches your AI app added from the exact card you marked, and a proposal drafted from the branches you decided to keep.

You start with
A product question in one sentence, a canvas in the folder MindMax has open, and a connected AI app.
Time
An afternoon, spread over as many short rounds as you like.
Your part
Marking the cards worth pulling on, rejecting the weak branches, and choosing what goes into the proposal.
DownloadSee the steps ↓

What you'll end up with

  • A canvas with the options, objections and the angle you had not considered, drawn as cards that keep their place between sessions.
  • A signed strip on each card the app wrote, so you can tell its suggestions from yours at a glance.
  • Relations between branches — supports, contradicts, refers to — instead of a flat list of ideas.
  • A proposal draft in your folder, written from the branch you settled on and linked back to the canvas as a document card.

The board is the deliverable. A chat answer scrolls away; these branches are still there next week.

How to grow a product canvas with your own AI app, step by step

  1. Put one question in the middle

    You

    “What would make a solo consultant actually keep a weekly planning habit?” A question with a real decision behind it beats a topic word.

  2. Connect the app you think in

    You

    Settings → External AI → Connect, with Collaborate access. Adding cards is a write; a read-only connection can look at the board but not grow it.

  3. Ask it to open the question up

    You ask · MindMax answers

    AskRead the canvas I have open in MindMax, add the options and objections as cards under the question, and draw the contradictions between them.

    The app reads which canvas is in front, adds cards signed with its name, and shows you the board at the end of the round.

  4. Mark one branch to keep thinking on

    You

    Hover a point under a card and press Hand to {app}, or use the card menu for the whole card. “What would have to be true for this to fail?” is enough; an empty request means keep going from here.

  5. Copy the sentence and send it yourself

    You

    AskHandle the requests I marked on the MindMax canvas and add your cards under the ones I marked.

    Copy prompt puts that sentence on your clipboard. MindMax cannot wake an app up — paste it into your app and press send.

  6. It reads only the waiting requests

    Your AI app

    The pending canvas requests come with the card and point they belong to, plus what changed since the last read. New cards are attached to that branch and the requests are marked handled.

  7. Write the settled branch into a proposal

    You ask · MindMax answers

    AskWrite the branch we settled on as a one-page proposal and save it as a document in MindMax, linked from this canvas.

    A new document appears in your folder, and the canvas gets a document card pointing at it, so the map shows which branch became which note.

Why it works here

The request lives on the card, not in a chat scroll

You mark the exact point you want pulled on. Next round, the app reads that request with its branch path, so “this one” does not need a paragraph of explanation.

AI mind map canvas →

Rounds accumulate instead of starting over

Each pass adds cards to the same board and reads only what changed since last time. Reject a branch by ignoring it; the ones you keep stay where you left them.

Canvas requests →

Thinking has an exit into a document

A branch can become a proposal without copying text out of a chat window. The new note is linked from the canvas, so the reasoning behind a decision stays reachable.

AI thinking models →

Also used here: Guide: working with an external AI agent · Guide: connect an AI app · Every tool the app can call · Open a hard question on the canvas in one pass

Where it gets hard

  • Nothing happens until you send the sentence

    A marked request is data on the card. Copying the prompt is not submitting it, and MindMax will not call the app on its own — there is no reverse channel.

  • The app can only add, and only revise its own cards

    It can append points to cards MindMax generated, but moving cards, changing colours, deleting them and rewriting your cards have no tool. Those edits stay yours in MindMax.

  • Terminal hosts show no picture

    Claude Code and Codex cannot display a canvas in the chat. MindMax opens the board in its own window and the app tells you where; not seeing an image does not mean the cards were not written.

  • A big board gets harder to summarise

    After several rounds, ask for a read of only what changed and name the branch you care about. Otherwise the app will keep re-reading the whole canvas.

  • You pay the app, not MindMax

    No MindMax credits are spent, but every round is tokens on the connected app’s account. A long brainstorm across a large canvas is a real amount of reading.

Then what

About an hour

Review a paper with your agent

When the decision needs evidence rather than more branches.

An afternoon

Think through a decision you keep going round on

When you would rather have MindMax’s own AI run the method.

An afternoon

Open a hard question on the canvas with your agent

When one pass is enough and you do not need to leave requests.

DownloadAll use cases

A brainstorm you cannot return to is a conversation, not a design.

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