Your first session: quick-start guidance
Once you're in a Session, these are the fastest ways to get value out of Theo.
Ask Theo something: a question, a task, or a problem you're stuck on. You can begin with any research goal in ordinary language.
Theo calls the appropriate tools or workflows to handle it; you don't need to set anything up first. Theo can decide whether to answer directly, ask for more context, or use a specialized phase.
Review the results. Theo will surface additional context — findings, sources, and other outputs — alongside its response.
Iterate and branch. Ask a follow-up, push back on a result, or branch into a new line of research. A Session isn't a fixed, one-way sequence.
For tougher questions, try Council Mode. It routes your question to multiple models, which reason independently and then synthesize a single response.
Not sure what to try first?
Chat: Try a task you'd normally start in a different AI tool. Try one of these prompts:
Review these papers and identify the main disagreements.
Help me turn this observation into a testable research question.
Design a method for evaluating this hypothesis.
Check this derivation and explain any invalid assumptions.
Analyze these results and recommend the next experiment.
Add Sources: relevant papers, data, notes, code, or images.
Review Artifacts: Review structured results in the Phase UI.
Move on or iterate: Continue the conversation, reuse an artifact, or revisit earlier work through Lineage.