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Onboard your profile

CoSci works better when it knows your research context — your field, methods, and what you care about. On first run it hands you a short onboarding wizard that grounds the cockpit in your work, so its questions, mechanisms and writing are about your domain rather than a generic default. It starts from your file, not a baked-in demo — nothing is wired to any one person.

The wizard, step by step

The one-click start.command opens the cockpit at localhost:8799 and drops you into the wizard on first run:

  1. Welcome — a quick overview of the few steps ahead.
  2. Tell CoSci about your work — drop a single file (a CV, research statement, or bio), or paste a short description. CoSci reads it locally and drafts seven research profiles plus a local vault. No long form to fill out. Prefer to skip the file? Choose Set up manually and enter your name, affiliation, research areas and techniques by hand.
  3. Review — see the identity, research areas, techniques and systems it inferred, and anything it wants you to confirm. You can refine all of it later in the Profile Bootstrapper.
  4. Choose what to watch — pick the discovery sources CoSci should scan: literature (journals, PubMed), preprints (bioRxiv, arXiv), grants (NIH, NSF), conferences & talks, and patents.
  5. Connect your sources (optional) — add a watched folder to index local papers and notes as they change, or import a Zotero library (a BibTeX / CSL JSON / RIS export) from Settings.
  6. Finish — land on Suggestions, where CoSci surfaces the relevant papers, grants and venues it found for the profiles you just created.

Re-run it later

The same profile-building lives on in the Profile Bootstrapper screen — point it at a new file any time to rebuild or extend your research profiles. In dev mode the starter seed is also available directly:

Terminal window
cd backend
uv run python seed_coscientist.py   # idempotent — safe to re-run

Reset

Your profiles, vault and all local state live in the SQLite database under backend/data/. To start clean:

Terminal window
rm backend/data/cockpit.db   # rebuildable; gitignored

Then re-run start.command to seed a fresh workspace and walk the wizard again.