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Your first project

In this lesson you create a project with Alis Ideate Projects in the console, give it one real source, watch the project turn that source into structured context, ask Alis, the agent in the console, a question about it, and have Alis create a document from it with Alis Ideate Artifacts. It is for anyone who is a member of an account with Ideate access, and takes about twenty minutes plus the time the project needs to read your file.

What you will build

A project that holds one contribution (a recording, transcript or document of your own), a filled-in Synthesis, one answered question, and one artifact: a product requirements document. At the end you look at the same project from the CLI.

Before you start

  • Membership of an AlisX account with Ideate access. If your company already uses AlisX, join its account; otherwise follow Create your account first. The project you create belongs to your active account, and that account is invoiced at the end of the month for what its members use.
  • One file that says something about a piece of work: a meeting recording, a transcript, a slide deck, a spreadsheet or a PDF. A project reads documents (pdf, docx, pptx, xlsx, csv, md, txt), images (png, jpg, webp), audio, video, code and zip files.
  • For the last step, the CLI installed and signed in. See Install the CLI.

1. Open the console

  1. Go to https://console.alisx.com and sign in.

You land on Home, the grid of what is waiting on you. The rail on the left lists Home and Skill store, then Projects, Interviews and Artifacts under Ideate, then the Alis Build tools under Build.

2. Create the project

  1. Open Projects and click New project.
  2. In Create a new project, fill in:
    • Project title: something short, for example Customer onboarding redesign.
    • Description (optional): one or two sentences on what the project is about. This gives Alis a head start.
    • Contributions (optional): leave this empty for now. You add the file in the next step so you can watch it being processed.
  3. Click Create project.

The project opens on a new chat with Alis. Alis reads the new project and asks what would make it clearer. You can answer now or later. The left rail lists the project's screens: Home, Context (Contributions and Interviews), Synthesis, Artifacts and Sharing, then the project's Chats. Open Synthesis: it is empty, and every section says nothing has been identified yet.

3. Add your first source

  1. Click Contributions in the rail. An empty project shows "Alis works from what you add here. Add documents, notes or a voice memo. Your synthesis and artifacts draw on it."
  2. Click Add contribution.
  3. Click Upload files and pick your file.
  4. In Note, add a line saying what the file is and why it matters, for example Recording of the onboarding review with the support team, 12 June.
  5. Click Add contribution.

You can also drag a file onto the Contributions screen where it says Drop files to upload. Once the contribution is added, Talk it through offers a chat with Alis about it; you do not need it for this lesson.

Back on Contributions, a tile appears for the file. While the project reads it, the tile says "Uploading this file." and then "Still reading this file. Insights appear here when it is done, and you can keep working meanwhile." A recording is transcribed; a document has its text and sections pulled out. A one-hour recording can take several minutes.

4. Watch the context settle

  1. Wait until the tile no longer says it is still reading. Click it to open the preview: the transcript or extracted text, and the insights the project drew from it.
  2. Click Synthesis in the rail.

Synthesis is a single document with a fixed set of sections, each written from your contributions: Overview, Pain points, Current process, Technology, Jargon, Stakeholders and Gap analysis. With one source some sections stay thin; that is expected. The Gap analysis section is the interesting one: it lists what is still unknown as conflicts, missing voices, open questions and unvalidated assumptions.

5. Ask a question

  1. On any project screen, click the box at the foot, What should Alis work on in this project?
  2. Type a question that your file should be able to answer, for example Who raised the most concerns about the current process, and what were they?
  3. Press Enter.

A new chat with Alis opens inside the project, and the rail lists it under Chats so you can come back to it. Alis answers from what the project holds, and anything on the project that an answer refers to shows as a tile you can open.

6. Create an artifact

  1. Click Artifacts in the rail. An empty project shows "Create a document from what you've learnt".
  2. Click New artifact.
  3. Choose Create from scratch.
  4. Under What should Alis create?, write one sentence, for example A product requirements document the delivery team can estimate from.
  5. Click Create artifact.

A new chat with Alis opens inside the project, and Alis writes the document from the project's context and saves it to the project as an artifact. When it is done, the artifact is listed on Artifacts; open it to read it, Download it or Share it.

7. See the project from the CLI

  1. Open a terminal and list your projects:

    alis ideate list

    ideas/<id>  —  Customer onboarding redesign  [ACTIVE]

  2. Map what the project holds:

    alis ideate context <id>

    The map names everyone involved, every output written for the project and your contribution with a summary, each by a bare id. It ends with the commands that read any one of them in full.

  3. List the project's artifacts, including the one Alis created:

    alis ideate artifacts list <id>

This is the same view a coding agent gets when it starts building from the project.

What you have

A project with one processed contribution, a Synthesis written from it, a question answered from it, one artifact Alis created, and the CLI commands that read all of it.

Where next