AI Features
Let AI discover patterns, suggest connections, and generate ideas across your garden.
Setting up AI
Neural Garden supports multiple AI providers — Claude (Anthropic), OpenAI, and Ollama (local). You bring your own API key. Go to Settings to configure your preferred provider and enter your API key. Ollama runs locally on your machine and requires no API key.
- 1Open Settings from the sidebar.
- 2Choose your AI provider (Claude, OpenAI, or Ollama).
- 3Enter your API key (not needed for Ollama).
- 4AI features are now available across the app.
Semantic indexing (embeddings)
Semantic search, related-thought suggestions, and clustering all rely on embeddings — numeric fingerprints of each thought's meaning. Turn on Automatic embeddings in Settings and Neural Garden indexes your thoughts in the background as your garden grows, re-clustering periodically. There's no manual 'Generate' step. It's off by default and needs a provider that supports embeddings — OpenAI (billed per request) or a local Ollama model. Claude can't produce embeddings, so the switch shows a warning until you pick a supported provider.
Command-K AI assistant
Press Cmd+K and type a natural language request to have AI act on your garden. You can create thoughts, connect or nest nodes, edit properties, and ask questions — all through conversational prompts. AI understands commands like 'add rice inside dinner' (nesting) or 'connect task under project' (edges). It can also answer questions about your garden's content using garden intelligence.
AI connection suggestions
The AI can analyze your thoughts and suggest connections between ideas that you might not have noticed. Use the sparkle button on a thought or open the garden intelligence panel to see AI-discovered relationships. Accept suggestions to create real connections.
Ghost suggestions
When you're working on a thought, AI can suggest new child thoughts — these appear as translucent 'ghost' nodes. Click a ghost to accept it as a real thought, or dismiss it to move on. This is great for brainstorming and expanding ideas.
Clustering
AI groups your thoughts into clusters based on content similarity. With Automatic embeddings on, clustering refreshes on its own in the background; you can also open the clusters panel and run it manually. Clusters are color-coded and can be viewed as visual regions on the canvas. Clustering needs embeddings, so it requires OpenAI or Ollama.
Garden intelligence
The garden intelligence panel provides AI-generated summaries and insights about your entire garden. It can identify themes, highlight gaps in your thinking, and suggest areas to explore further.
Privacy
Your API keys are stored locally in your browser — they never touch the server. When using Claude or OpenAI, thought content is sent to the provider's API for analysis. For maximum privacy, use Ollama to run AI entirely on your own machine.