For researchers
Your literature, minus the part you quit.
You're not behind on the reading — you're behind on the filing. Drop a paper, an abstract, a half-formed margin note in plain language, and it becomes a connected map of your literature you can open and just ask. Not a smarter search box over a pile of PDFs.
Sound familiar
You've started a research system before. It worked for about three weeks.
The PDFs are downloaded, the abstracts skimmed, the highlights made. The thinking happened. But every source sits in a folder you'll have to name, under a tag you'll have to invent, in a system you'll rebuild in six months and abandon by spring.
You find a paper that matters, you open your notes, and before you can keep a single line the tool asks: which project? which folder? which tag? By the time you've decided, the connection you actually wanted — this one's responding to the thing I read on Tuesday — is gone. That cost, of sorting a thought before you're allowed to keep it, is the filing tax.
For a researcher it compounds, because the value was never in any one source — it's in how the sources sit next to each other, and that's exactly what the filing chore eats. You didn't quit because you were lazy. You quit because the tool made you the librarian of your own field.
It draws the map
Drop the pile. It draws the map.
Paste an abstract, drag in a text-layer PDF, type the half-paragraph you wrote at 1am about why a result smelled wrong — in whatever order it came. Naumu reads it and pulls out the sources, claims, authors, and methods, then draws the lines you never would: the paper to the method it shares, the draft sentence to the messy note the number really came from. A connected map of your literature that grows as you add to it.
Then just ask
Click the answer back to where it came from.
Once it's a connected map you stop searching for files and start questioning your literature — and every answer comes back with the source and date it was pulled from, so you can click straight back to it.
A first pass you fix in a glance — the date is when the fact entered your map, not the paper’s publication date; that lives in the source you traced back to. Illustrative; on the live page you paste your own and ask.
Keep it — and bring the folder you already have.
While you’re just trying it there’s no account, no email — and nothing is saved. Watch the map assemble, poke at it, close the tab and the trial is gone. The only question left is: want it tomorrow? Tap Keep and it saves to your private space, there on your laptop, your phone, next week. And minus the part you quit means far less of the filing, not none: you skim what it filed and tap to keep — one tap, seconds, the only chore left. Then it stays useful because you never have to re-file it.
You don’t start at a blank canvas with a brave little "New Note" button, either. Drag in the folder of 30 PDFs a past tool promised to read and didn’t. Text-layer PDFs read fine today — title, authors, abstract, body — as a first pass you correct in a glance; scans and image-only pages don’t parse yet, and it’s honest about which is which. Because it’s your literature, the in-app agent never rewrites your map behind your back: it shows you a plain-language before-and-after and nothing lands until you confirm. You’re the editor of record.
Nothing is saved until you tap Keep; your paste is processed to build the map, then cleared if you don’t. Your space is private to you; the AI acts as you and sees only what you can. Where your data lives — including the honest answer for pre-publication material — is at /docs.
Who this is for
You loved the connected-map idea and got tired of being the librarian of your own field.
If hand-building your slip-box is the thinking for you — if drawing every link by hand is the part you love — Naumu takes that job away and you’ll miss it. And if you want offline-first, local Markdown files you own forever with a deep plugin ecosystem, that’s Obsidian, and it’s genuinely good at it. One hard line up front: your paste is processed on a server to build the map, and your private space lives online once you Keep it — if your unpublished data can never touch a server you don’t control, check /docs first.
Naumu is for the other researcher. The one with a folder of 30 abstracts, a Zotero library you’re scared to open, and three reference systems you’ve already abandoned — who wants the map built and kept without becoming its full-time gardener.
Why it holds up
A Zettelkasten without the second job.
It draws the links, not just stores
The slip-box dream only worked if you drew every backlink by hand, forever — and the week you fell behind it quietly died. Naumu infers the connections from plain text and draws them: no [[brackets]], no nightly grooming, no manual re-linking.
Every fact traces to its source
Ask in plain language and the answer comes back with the note or abstract it was pulled from and a one-click path back — the line in your note, the place in the PDF you dragged in. Nothing invented; nothing floats free of where you read it.
It lasts because you never re-file it
No tag system to design first, no folders to reorganize — there were never folders. You correct a handful of first-pass links instead of grooming a vault, and it doesn’t decay the week you get busy the way a hand-linked one does.
FAQ
The stuff you’re actually wondering.
Drop your pile.
Throw in an abstract, a margin note, or the whole folder of PDFs, and watch it build into a connected map you can finally just ask. No signup, no email — and nothing is saved until you tap Keep.