How Cranes learns
Where chapters come from, when they change, and why Cranes won’t claim more than your words support.
Cranes reads what you’ve actually said and drafts chapters about the judgment underneath it. Each chapter is one thing it has understood: a standard you hold, a distinction you keep drawing, a way you tend to decide, an exception you’ve made, or a question you haven’t settled.
What it learns from
Your own thinking learns from:
- your messages in threads,
- notes and files you add,
- history you bring in,
- ideas kept from your conversations with connected AIs,
- anything you ask a connected AI to save to Cranes.
It doesn’t learn from an AI’s replies to you as if they were your words. When something an AI wrote is kept, because you asked it to save a reply, say, the entry is marked as written by that AI.
When it learns
Your own thinking learns as entries arrive. Add a note, and Cranes starts reading it right away. Messages in a thread are read together, after a few messages or once the conversation goes quiet. There’s nothing to press.
Shared thinking works differently. The team’s thinking and each group’s learn from new entries together in passes: each night, sooner once enough entries are waiting, or when someone chooses Learn now. That way a busy day doesn’t redraft the book over and over. See The team’s thinking.
Only what your words support
A chapter has to rest on something you said. You can open the moments behind any chapter and read them in your own words. Where the evidence is thin or pulls two ways, the section is marked Still forming. Where there’s a reasonable other way to read it, Why it says this says so.
Cranes also starts narrow. Something you said about one project stays about that project until more of what you say shows it holds more widely. A single episode doesn’t become a rule about you.
Chapters change
As you say more, chapters get sharper, split in two, merge with a neighbor, or retire when nothing supports them anymore. A rewritten chapter says Redrafted, and opening that shows what changed and what stayed.
Your choices outlast these changes. If you pinned, renamed, or moved a chapter, the choice follows it through a redraft. When Cranes can’t tell where a choice belongs, it asks you under Needs a look instead of guessing. See What “Needs a look” means.
It’s not a portrait
Chapters are written about judgments, not about “you” or “they.” Cranes doesn’t produce a summary of who you are, and it won’t give you a type. What you notice and care about can matter across situations, and chapters can say so, but a broad chapter isn’t a claim that it’s true everywhere.