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Aletheia User Manual

Aletheia is MCP-first knowledge management: one Postgres-backed corpus of everything you capture — notes, meeting transcripts, decisions, research — with the retrieval and reasoning surface exposed as tools any MCP client can call. The app documented here is a full client on top of that corpus: a note editor, hybrid search, and an agentic chat that answers with citations back to your own notes. Ask a question and you get a plain-English answer with pills linking to the exact notes it drew from.

A chat answer with inline citation pills.

Chat reads across your whole corpus and answers with citations back to the source notes.

The four surfaces on the top navigation bar.

The whole app is four surfaces plus quick find: **①** Editor · **②** Search · **③** Chat · **④** Settings · **⑤** Quick find.

The Aletheia workspace — the note library in the slate theme.

The workspace: your whole library in one place — notebooks on the left, a live, filterable table of every note on the right.

This manual documents the app function by function, with screenshots, best-use practices, and things to watch out for. Everything shown uses a fictional demo corpus — "Project Orion" at the fictional client "Acme Robotics" — so nothing here is real data.

How this manual is organized

  • Getting started — the one idea that makes everything click, the vocabulary, and a tour of the interface.

  • Writing & organizing — the editor, the metadata sidecar, notebooks, tags, links, and interactive diagrams.

  • Finding & reasoning — hybrid search, and chat that reads across your corpus and answers with sources.

  • Data & health — bringing data in (Joplin, markdown, email) and watching the extraction pipeline.

  • The MCP surface — what "MCP-first" means, connecting Claude Desktop / Code, and the full tool catalog.

  • Settings — themes, identity, the autorouter, accounts, and the desktop app.

New here? Read these three first

Welcome → Core concepts → The interface at a glance. Fifteen minutes, and the rest of the manual reads as reference rather than tutorial.

A note on scope

Aletheia is a private build in active development. This manual describes the app as it actually ships today — four surfaces (Editor · Search · Chat · Settings) over one corpus, plus the MCP tool surface your AI clients use. Where a capability is planned but not yet wired, it's called out explicitly rather than implied.