How your AI uses Cranes
What a connected AI gets from Cranes, when it asks, and what it never sees.
Once you connect an AI like ChatGPT or Claude, it can check with Cranes before it answers. Cranes looks at what you just asked and hands back the small part of your thinking that should change the answer, if any. Then the AI answers the way it normally would, with that in mind.
When it checks
Your AI checks with Cranes before substantial work where something you’ve worked out could matter: a decision, a piece of writing held to your standard, a plan that runs into a judgment you’ve already made. You don’t have to mention Cranes for this to happen. For small, context-free requests, it usually gets nothing back and carries on.
It doesn’t recite your chapters back to you or tell you what Cranes said, unless you ask. The point is a better answer, not a report.
What it gets
Not your whole thinking. For each message, Cranes sends a short brief: what should change the next reply, what to be careful not to assume, and where each piece came from, whether a chapter or an exact quote from an entry. It’s the same brief you can see under Brought in in a Cranes thread. See See what Cranes brought into a reply.
Cranes sends your AI only what you’ve let it use, and only your current message and a little context, never your whole conversation.
What it never gets
- Anything from thinking you didn’t choose when you connected it.
- The exact words of entries you marked Keep off connected AIs.
- Archived chapters and parts.
- Entries you’ve stopped learning from or removed.
- A group, unless you name the group and it’s allowed for that AI.
It can add to Cranes, too
When you ask your AI to save, remember, or correct something, it can add that to Cranes as an entry. And if you allow it, Cranes keeps your own ideas from those conversations to learn from, such as a position you take or a view you revise, never routine requests or the AI’s replies. See Ideas kept from your conversations.
Under the hood
Cranes connects through MCP, an open standard many AI apps use to reach outside tools. That’s why the same connection works across different apps. You don’t need to know anything about it to use Cranes, but it’s the word you’ll see in some apps’ settings.