Open Cranes

How your AI uses Cranes

What a connected AI sends Cranes, what it gets back, and what it never sees.

Connect an AI like Claude or ChatGPT once, and you can bring your thinking into any conversation there. Type @cranes, or ask what your thinking says, and your AI asks Cranes. Cranes hands back the part of your thinking that bears on what you asked, and your AI shows you what it was and where it came from before answering.

The rest of the time, your AI leaves Cranes out.

The short version

What your AI sends Cranes

Your current message and a short description of the work. When your message depends on something just before it, like “no, shorter”, Cranes carries the conversation on from earlier calls. Cranes never reads your AI’s chat history, memory, or files.

Cranes keeps a record of each request and the guidance it gave, so later requests in the same conversation can build on it. These records are never entries unless you save something. Removing an entry removes its words from them too.

What Cranes sends back

Not your whole thinking. Only what bears on this request:

  • what Cranes guides, each part with whose thinking it is;
  • the pages it drew on, and the part of each page it used;
  • exact quotes from your entries, and your skills that fit the work;
  • up to two pages other people shared with you, credited to them, when they bear on it and the answer is for you alone. See Pages shared with you;
  • one line on what Cranes added and whose thinking it came from, like “From the team’s thinking in Cranes: reviews start from the customer’s problem.”

When nothing applies, your AI says so in a line.

What it never gets

  • Anything you didn’t let that AI use.
  • A group, unless you name it and it’s turned on for that AI.
  • The words of entries marked Keep off connected AIs.
  • Archived pages and topics.
  • Entries you’ve stopped learning from or removed.

Under the hood

Cranes connects through MCP, an open standard many AI apps use to reach outside tools. It’s the word you’ll see in some apps’ settings. You don’t need to know anything else about it.

How your AI uses Cranes Ask us