NodeBench AI

Entity intelligence for any company, market, or question.

Live: nodebenchai.com
npm: npx nodebench-mcp / npx nodebench-mcp-power / npx nodebench-mcp-admin
GitHub: HomenShum/nodebench-ai

Product

NodeBench is a research and reporting product built around five user-facing surfaces:

• Home = start quickly
• Chat = do the work
• Reports = reusable memory
• Nudges = return at the right moment
• Me = operator context and control

The core idea is simple:

users do not just need a chatbot that answers once.

They need a system that can:

• take a question, file, URL, or prior thread
• search and synthesize with sources
• turn the run into a reusable artifact
• watch for meaningful change later
• improve the next run from what it learned

What Shipped

• five-surface web app across Home, Chat, Reports, Nudges, and Me
• typed search and reporting pipeline
• live SSE streaming with saved runtime state
• Convex-backed product state for sessions, reports, entities, nudges, files, and related objects
• shared-context handoff and delegation plumbing
• local and deployed server runtime for search, streaming, voice, and shared context routes
• nodebench-mcp, nodebench-mcp-power, and nodebench-mcp-admin distribution lanes
• builder-facing Oracle, dogfood, eval, replay, and control-plane infrastructure

Product At A Glance

USER SURFACES
-------------
Home      -> start quickly
Chat      -> answer, sources, trace, follow-ups
Reports   -> reusable report memory
Nudges    -> return loop
Me        -> operator context, permissions, controls

BACKEND
-------
Convex tables and product state for sessions, reports, entities, nudges,
files, shared context, and evaluation artifacts

RUNTIME
-------
search pipeline
  -> answer packet
  -> saved report
  -> tracked entity / tracked theme / follow-up task
  -> nudge or prep brief
  -> resumed chat or reopened report

COMPOUNDING LOOP
----------------
question
  -> answer
  -> saved report
  -> watch item
  -> useful nudge
  -> better next run

DISTRIBUTION
------------
nodebenchai.com
nodebench-mcp
nodebench-mcp-power
nodebench-mcp-admin

Why This Design

NodeBench is designed around a few product realities:

1. A useful answer should not disappear after one chat turn.
2. Saved work should become reusable memory, not a dead archive row.
3. The product should bring the user back only when something meaningful changes.
4. The system should gradually learn how the user works without forcing a heavy onboarding flow.
5. Operator context should improve future runs without turning the system into corporate-speak or fake-agreeable sludge.

That drives the current design:

• answer-first execution
• advisor mode by design via dynamic routing:
  • fast executive lane for routine work
  • deeper advisor lane for ambiguity, planning, and harder reasoning
  • similar in spirit to Claude Code's official opusplan split: stronger planning lane, cheaper execution lane
• saved artifacts as first-class objects
• visible sources and traceability
• a five-page loop instead of five unrelated tabs
• future Harness v2 work focused on specification, operator context, and compounding behavior

Plain English:

NodeBench should not spend the most expensive reasoning path on every request.
It should move fast by default, then go deeper when the task, evidence, or user
request justifies it.

The detailed implementation, verification, and evaluation plan for this mode lives in:

• HARNESS_V2_PROPOSAL.md
• HARNESS_V2_BUILD_PLAN.md

How The Five Pages Compound

NodeBench should not feel like five separate destinations.

The intended product behavior is:

Home
  -> start quickly

Chat
  -> do the work
  -> create the first useful artifact

Reports
  -> turn that artifact into reusable memory

Nudges
  -> bring the user back when something important changes

Me
  -> improve how the next run is handled

Next Home or Chat run
  -> starts with more context than before

The shortest version of the compounding loop is:

question
  -> answer
  -> saved report
  -> watch item
  -> useful nudge
  -> better next run

Plain-English artifact flow:

input
  -> answer packet
  -> saved report
  -> tracked entity / tracked theme / follow-up task
  -> nudge or prep brief
  -> resumed report or resumed chat
  -> user correction or confirmation
  -> updated operator context
  -> better next run

What each page contributes:

• Home starts the run with the least friction possible
• Chat creates the answer, sources, trace, entities, and next actions
• Reports turns those into a durable report the user can reopen, refresh, and reuse
• Nudges watches that report or entity and decides when it matters again
• Me stores the operator context that improves the next answer

Current Legacy Infrastructure

NodeBench is not starting from zero. The repo already contains a substantial legacy stack that works today.

Current legacy foundation:

• five-surface web product
• Convex-backed canonical data layer
• local and deployed server runtime
• harness v1 planning and execution path
• shared-context handoff and delegation support
• MCP distribution lanes
• builder-facing evaluation and control-plane systems

What that means:

• the problem is not missing architecture
• the problem is product behavior, workflow compression, and clearer cross-surface compounding

Roadmap

The near-term goal is:

keep the working legacy foundation
remove accidental complexity
add specification-aware operator context
ship one clear compounding workflow

Main tasks still to finish:

• make Home -> Chat -> Reports -> Nudges -> Me behave like one continuous workflow instead of five adjacent surfaces
• turn harness v1 into the clearer v2 shape described in HARNESS_V2_PROPOSAL
• ship Layer 0 operator context so the system can learn useful workflow patterns without forcing a heavy onboarding flow
• support permissioned transcript ingestion from NodeBench chats first, then optional external logs such as Claude Code JSONL transcripts for nodebench-mcp
• add style-drift guardrails so the system learns judgment and workflow without overfitting to corporate voice, filler, or sycophancy
• add anticipatory prep behavior so the system can prepare the user before important interactions, not only answer after the fact
• make saved reports behave like reusable memory, not storage
• make Nudges a real return loop with at least one working daily trigger
• make Me clearly improve future runs by exposing what context is being used and why
• finish the nodebench-mcp v3 cut-and-split plan so default runtime, power runtime, and admin runtime are clearly separated
• instrument real latency, real cost, real artifact completion, and real reuse across both web and MCP flows
• keep README, runtime behavior, and exposed tool counts in sync so the public story matches the actual system
• keep dogfood, eval, and builder-control infrastructure as internal leverage instead of letting it leak into the main user-facing product

Quick Start

Web app

Open nodebenchai.com and start in Home.

MCP

# Claude Code
claude mcp add nodebench -- npx -y nodebench-mcp

# Claude Code power lane
claude mcp add nodebench-power -- npx -y nodebench-mcp-power

# Claude Code admin lane
claude mcp add nodebench-admin -- npx -y nodebench-mcp-admin

# Cursor
npx nodebench-mcp --preset cursor

# Generic MCP client
npx nodebench-mcp

Local development

git clone https://github.com/HomenShum/nodebench-ai.git
cd nodebench-ai
npm install
cp .env.example .env.local

# Frontend + Convex + voice server
npm run dev

# Production build
npm run build

Architecture

nodebenchai.com (React + Vite + Tailwind)
    |
Convex Cloud (sessions, reports, entities, nudges, files, product state)
    |
server runtime + search pipeline + SSE
    |
answer packet
    |
saved report
    |
tracked entities / watch conditions / nudges
    |
future runs with better operator context

Student Learning Lessons

The notebook and diligence stack in this repo are a good example of a common product engineering tradeoff:

• the best user experience is one notebook that feels continuous
• the safest current runtime is still layered and block-addressable underneath

For NodeBench, that means:

• founder is a trait and diligence block, not a permanent sixth tab
• diligence should use one generic pipeline, not many narrow *Identify.ts features
• the runtime should stay scratchpad-first -> structuring pass -> deterministic merge
• user-owned prose should feel local-first and calm while typing
• live agent output should arrive as overlays or decorations first, not as direct document mutations
• accepted agent output should become frozen, user-owned notebook content
• provenance should stay available, but secondary to the reading and writing flow

Why the notebook does not use one giant live editor model yet:

• collaboration is more reliable when the system can address bounded sections
• provenance, evidence, and contribution logs need stable attachment points
• background agent updates should not compete with user keystrokes
• deterministic section-level merge is easier to reason about than whole-page mutation churn

The practical rule in this repo is:

UX should feel monolithic.
Runtime should stay layered.
Typing should be local-first.
Agent output should be overlay-first.
Accepted output should become owned prose.

Current notebook refactor lessons:

• hide the block machinery from the reading path
• keep chrome quiet and move metadata to hover or focus
• isolate the notebook surface from page-level re-render churn
• favor one memoized notebook boundary over many inline object props
• treat live diligence as read-only reference overlay until the user accepts it
• when accepted, materialize a frozen notebook snapshot with explicit provenance
• anchor live overlays at the notebook surface, not inside the first editable row
• let Convex projection rows carry real source metadata so the UI is not forced to reconstruct trust state from prose alone
• use one generic projection producer for overlays: report save writes the same structured rows that page-load backfill and manual refresh re-run
• when moving beyond report-backed overlays, stream raw scratchpad only in a secondary rail and emit structured projection rows on checkpoint rather than dumping scratchpad prose into the notebook body
• if checkpoint structure comes from an LLM, keep it block-scoped and schema-bound: scratchpad checkpoint -> JSON -> validation/repair -> deterministic fallback -> projection row
• let the model structure intermediate JSON, but keep merge, persistence, and notebook ownership deterministic
• ship generic diligence primitives first, then block-specific renderers

For students reading the code, the most relevant docs are:

• AGENT_PIPELINE
• DILIGENCE_BLOCKS
• SCRATCHPAD_PATTERN
• PROSEMIRROR_DECORATIONS
• SESSION_ARTIFACTS

The live notebook refactor is deliberately incremental:

• current shipped slices make the notebook feel more continuous and reduce per-keystroke render churn
• current shipped slices also move live diligence into notebook-surface overlays instead of seeded block-like records and freeze accepted snapshots
• the end state is one notebook experience with layered internals, not a raw block UI and not a brittle giant document runtime

Key tech

• Frontend: React, Vite, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS
• Backend: Convex
• Search: Linkup + Gemini extraction + grounding pipeline
• MCP server: Node.js + TypeScript
• Realtime runtime: SSE + Convex-backed persistence

API Keys

Set these in .env.local for local work or in Convex / Vercel for deployed environments.

Key	Required	Purpose
GEMINI_API_KEY	Yes	classification, extraction, synthesis
LINKUP_API_KEY	Recommended	web search and sourced answers
VITE_CONVEX_URL	Yes	Convex deployment URL

Codebase map

Top-3 levels, annotated. See ARCHITECTURE.md for the pipeline diagram and docs/architecture/README.md for the 13 canonical architecture docs.

nodebench-ai/
├── README.md                   ← you are here
├── ARCHITECTURE.md             ← top-level pipeline diagram
├── CONTRIBUTING.md             ← contribution bar
├── CLAUDE.md                   ← Claude Code conventions for this repo
├── AGENTS.md                   ← agent methodology + eval bench
├── LICENSE                     ← MIT
│
├── src/                        ← React frontend (Vite)
│   ├── features/               ← feature-first, 30 folders (Home · Chat · Reports · Nudges · Me · entities · agents · …)
│   │   └── <feature>/          ← views · components · hooks · lib · __tests__ (colocated)
│   ├── shared/                 ← shared UI primitives, hooks, utils
│   ├── lib/                    ← registry, analytics, error reporting
│   └── layouts/                ← shell + cockpit + public
│
├── server/                     ← Node runtime (Express + MCP gateway)
│   ├── pipeline/               ← agent harness runtime + diligence blocks
│   ├── routes/                 ← HTTP routes (search, harness, founder episodes)
│   ├── mcpGateway.ts           ← WebSocket MCP gateway
│   └── services/               ← shared services
│
├── convex/                     ← Convex backend
│   ├── domains/                ← 19 domain folders (agents · product · research · founder · search · …)
│   ├── schema.ts               ← database schema (includes agentScratchpads)
│   └── crons.ts                ← scheduled jobs
│
├── packages/
│   ├── mcp-local/              ← the published nodebench-mcp npm package (MIT)
│   ├── mcp-client/             ← typed client SDK
│   └── convex-mcp-nodebench/   ← Convex-side MCP auditor
│
├── .claude/
│   ├── README.md               ← map of the .claude/ layout
│   ├── rules/                  ← 31 modular rules with related_ cross-refs
│   ├── skills/                 ← reusable how-to procedures
│   ├── agents/                 ← subagent configs
│   └── commands/               ← custom slash commands
│
├── docs/
│   ├── README.md               ← docs tree map
│   ├── ONBOARDING.md           ← 30-minute new-contributor path
│   ├── architecture/           ← 13 canonical specs + plans/ + README index
│   ├── agents/                 ← agent docs + bootstrap configs
│   ├── guides/                 ← how-to for builders
│   ├── decisions/              ← ADRs
│   ├── changelog/              ← release notes
│   ├── product/                ← product decisions
│   ├── qa/                     ← QA protocols
│   └── archive/                ← superseded content, provenance-only
│
├── tests/
│   ├── e2e/                    ← Playwright end-to-end
│   └── fixtures/               ← shared fixtures
│
├── scripts/                    ← dogfood, eval harness, one-offs
├── public/                     ← static assets served by Vite + Vercel
└── vendor/                     ← third-party references

Related Docs

Start here: docs/ONBOARDING.md · ARCHITECTURE.md · docs/architecture/README.md

The 13 canonical architecture docs are organized in 4 tiers. See docs/architecture/README.md for the indexed map:

• Tier 1 (core pipeline): AGENT_PIPELINE · DILIGENCE_BLOCKS · USER_FEEDBACK_SECURITY
• Tier 2 (sub-patterns): SCRATCHPAD_PATTERN · PROSEMIRROR_DECORATIONS · AGENT_OBSERVABILITY · SESSION_ARTIFACTS
• Tier 3 (features): FOUNDER_FEATURE · REPORTS_AND_ENTITIES · AUTH_AND_SHARING
• Tier 4 (cross-cutting): MCP_INTEGRATION · EVAL_AND_FLYWHEEL · DESIGN_SYSTEM

Historical specs are preserved in docs/archive/2026-q1/.

Product Suite

NodeBench AI   = flagship user surface
nodebench-mcp  = workflow lane
Attrition.sh   = measured replay + optimization lane

Attrition is not a third flagship. It is the measurable optimization lane for the same NodeBench workflow.

License

MIT