1
Create your account
Go to app.oncortex.ai and register with your email address, or sign in with Google. If you register with email, confirm your address from the email we send you, then sign in and complete your profile: your name and a workspace name (your company name, or just your own).
2
Meet your brain
Open Brains. You already have one, called My Work Brain. It was created with your account, and its member list starts with exactly one person: you. Nobody else can see into a brain they are not a member of, so it is yours alone unless you one day choose to share it. This is where everything you capture lands unless you deliberately send it somewhere else.
3
Capture your first item
Open your brain and go to its Inbox. Drag in a file: meeting notes, a PDF, a Word document, anything with words in it. It appears in the inbox as a new item, with its text extracted and ready to file.Nothing goes straight into the brain. The inbox is the tray on top of the filing cabinet: everything waits there until it is filed.
4
Watch it get filed
Straightforward items are filed for you: a page is created in the right part of the brain, written in plain language, with a note of where the information came from. Anything Cortex is not confident about is parked in the review queue instead, with a suggested filing and the reasoning, waiting for your yes or no.You can also file items yourself, or have your connected agent do it, which brings us to the good part.
5
Connect your agent
Open your brain’s Connect page. You will see your workspace’s connection URL. Add it to your AI tool:
- Claude (web or desktop): add it as a connector and approve the connection when Cortex asks.
- Claude Code: copy the one-line
claude mcp addcommand shown on the Connect page, run it, and approve in the browser window that opens. - Anything else that speaks MCP: paste the URL as a remote MCP server.
6
Ask your agent to remember
In your agent, ask something like “Search my brain for what I uploaded earlier” or “What do you know about me so far?”. The agent searches your brain and answers with what it finds, citing the pages it read.From now on, anything you tell your agent to save, and anything you drop in the inbox, becomes part of what it remembers.
Where next
Core concepts
Brain, page, inbox, skill, connection: the five nouns in two sentences each.
The inbox in depth
Statuses, the review queue, and what happens to duplicates.