# Curating the Mind

> The review queue at Organize, the Names directory, Put away, and why the workspace asks before it believes anything.

The Mind proposes and you decide. What the engine infers waits in a review
queue, and everything it applies is written to a log you can undo from. Tags,
connections and links can all be taken back. A merge cannot, so the engine
never merges anything on its own.

## Choose how much it does alone

At the top of **Organize** is the weave setting, with three positions. Only
the workspace owner and admins can change it.

- **Off**: Margin weaves only when you run Organize yourself. Nothing happens in the background.
- **Suggest**: the default. As you add things, Margin proposes tags, hubs and connections, and they wait for you. Nothing applies itself.
- **Auto**: everything in Suggest, plus Margin applies the confident threads as it goes. Only high-confidence ones, and only ever additive: it adds a tag or draws a link, and never deletes or moves anything. Merges and "who is this" questions still wait for you.

Below the setting, Organize has three panels: Review, Guide and Activity.

## Review: the queue

Proposals are grouped by kind. Each group collapses and shows a count.

- **Who's who**: a role it met and cannot place. "Who is your 'sister'?" Type
  a name or tap one of the hubs it offers. Offers are sorted by kind, so a
  question about a person shows people first, and anything of another kind
  says what it is on the chip. Answering with a project or an agent is allowed
  and asks first, because binding a role to a different kind of thing is a
  decision. Once answered, that word resolves to that hub everywhere, and you
  are asked once.
- **People & aliases**: two names that look like one real thing. "Sam looks
  like shorthand for Samuel, same person?" This includes the same thing filed
  once as a person and once as a project.
- **People & projects**: items that mention a person or project, to be
  threaded through that hub.
- **Connections**: this note and that card are about the same work.
- **Tags**: themes to file notes under, drawn from labels you already use.

> **Careful: A merge is permanent** Accepting under People & aliases folds the two hubs into one and keeps every
> mention. It cannot be undone, so read the reason before you accept. The
> engine is cautious here on purpose: a wrong merge is worse than a missed one,
> so pairs it is unsure of stay questions.

Accept a row and it becomes part of the graph. Dismiss it and it moves to a
collapsed Dismissed section, where you can restore it. Give a reason when you
dismiss and that reason steers the next pass. **Accept all** handles a whole
group at once, which is the sane way through a backlog.

A "who is this?" question has a quiet third answer, **Don't track**: Margin
keeps what you wrote but stops treating that role as a person to follow.

> **On the phone:** In the phone app's Review, **Accept all** sits in the top bar and asks which
> group: tags, connections, or people and project links, each with how many are
> waiting. Questions about who someone is and merges stay one at a time. A
> "who is this?" sheet has **Don't track** under Save.

Anything from a board, note or folder you weave privately files into its own
collapsed Private group instead of mixing with the rest.

## Guide: tell it once

When the same wrong suggestion keeps coming back, write a plain sentence in
Guide: "Alex and Alexander are the same person", or "Don't connect workout
cards to work projects". The next pass reads it. **Weave these in now** runs
that pass straight away.

> **Note:** A guidance line is an instruction for the next pass, and it retires after
> that pass has used it. A line that names a person or project already in your
> graph is kept for good, copied into what Margin has been taught about that
> hub.

Guide also explains the weave setting at length, with the same switch.

## Activity: what changed

Activity lists what was applied and when, with the links that came from it.
Each row can be undone, and after an Auto pass **Undo last run** reverses the
whole batch.

## Names: the directory the graph built

**Names** (**Mind → Names**, the middle of the three tabs at
the top of the sidebar) shows every person, project, organization and agent
the Mind has found in your writing, as a grid with a tab for each kind. It is
not the list of people who share the workspace; that is
[People](https://themarginapp.com/docs/people-and-roles). Open a name and its sheet holds:

- a short profile Margin keeps of who they are to you;
- **Teach Margin about this person** (or project, or organization): a field treated as fact, shaping the
  profile and every connection Margin reasons about. Only the workspace owner
  and admins can write it, and it shows who taught it;
- the name, which you can change (the old one stays as an alias), and its other
  aliases under **Also known as**;
- **Appears in**: every item that mentions it, each one a link;
- **Connected to**: what it links to and why, and a way to draw a link by hand;
- merging it into another hub, and hiding it from the graph.

Teaching is the fastest way to correct the record, and the assistant reads it
too. A hidden hub leaves the graph along with its connections and questions,
while everything you wrote stays; **Hidden from graph** at the foot of Names
brings it back. Merges survive re-indexing.

> **On the phone:** In the phone app, **Names in your notes** is at the foot of **Memory** and in
> the Mind's menu, and **Open in Names** on a hub star goes straight to that
> name. The kinds are chips above a list, and a name opens as a sheet with the
> same profile, teaching, aliases, mentions and links. Connect, merge and hide
> each ask before they change anything, and **Find new connections** and
> **Hidden from graph** work the same as on the web.

## Putting something away

Sometimes the answer is "this should not be here at all". Open a learned star
on the **Mind** map (a hub, a fact, a pattern) and choose **Put away**. It
does three things to the notes and cards that star was learned from.

**What Put away does**

1. Seals them in your Vault. They stay yours to read once you unlock it, and
   stay invisible to the assistant until you do.
2. Takes them out of memory, so no later pass learns them again. Sealing
   alone would not stop that, because a Vault item is private but still
   woven.
3. Deletes what was already learned from them: the connections, the
   mentions, the embeddings. At once, without waiting for a pass.

The notes and cards themselves are untouched, and it only reaches items you
can already open. A star that threads through a board you are not on leaves
that board alone. Your Vault needs to be set up and unlocked, because sealing
needs the key; if it is locked, Put away asks you to unlock instead of doing
half the job.

Everything put away is listed under Put away in the Vault panel, in
**Settings → Your Brain**, with one **Bring back** per item. That unseals it
and lets Margin learn from it again on the next pass. A privacy control you
cannot undo is one you learn not to touch, so both directions take one action.

> **For agents:** The assistant has no tool to seal, unseal or put away, for the same reason it
> has none to unlock a PIN. An agent you connect over MCP can read the queue
> with `weave_list_suggestions` and act with `accept_suggestion` and
> `dismiss_suggestion`, but sealed items never appear to it, and a Who's who
> question is answered in the app.

## A weekly five minutes

**Once a week is plenty**

1. Open **Organize** and collapse every group, then scan the counts.
2. Accept the People & aliases questions that are plainly right.
3. Dismiss the noise, with a reason if it keeps coming back.
4. Add one line in Guide if something keeps recurring wrongly.

The assistant's recall reads this same graph, so a cleanup shows up in its
next answer.

**Where to next**

- [The Mind](https://themarginapp.com/docs/the-mind): what it holds, About you, and the controls that keep things out
- [Your data](https://themarginapp.com/docs/your-data): the Vault, and what it does and does not encrypt
- [Agents and MCP](https://themarginapp.com/docs/agents-and-mcp): working the queue from a client of your own


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Section: The Mind. Checked against the running product on October 5, 2026.
Web page: https://themarginapp.com/docs/curating-the-mind. Every docs page: https://themarginapp.com/docs/llms.txt