Tinderbox, Claude AI, and theBrain

Tutorials and Examples
1

The new activity posted here about using Tinderbox experimentally with Claude AI has opened up a lot of productive paths!
I’ve been using Tinderbox and Claude AI for a week now, and enjoy being able to use the features of Claude Desktop to build and enhance Tinderbox files.
Today I tried something new, and it worked: linking TheBrain and Tinderbox using Claude Desktop.
TheBrain is a long-time PKM tool that I’ve got about 10 years of “thoughts” in; I track daily journal notes, projects, and events in TheBrain, and launch a Tinderbox file when I need to extend my thinking more powerfully.
I modified the Claude Desktop configuration file to add an additional MCP that referenced TheBrain’s API (my API key is blurred in the attachment.)

2025-08-15_12-23-43
2025-08-15_12-23-431524×894 89.9 KB

Then, I launched Claude Desktop; it brings up Tinderbox, and The Brain is already activated (by me).

I’m interested in short stories, and so I posed this query to Claude:

create notes with a summary of the short story “A Silver Dish” by Saul Bellow. Link new notes describing the plot of the story, the major characters, and information about the author

I also asked Claude to create more notes and links:

create child notes for each of the characters and link them to each other based upon relationships

Claude created the following TBX file with the resulting notes:

A Silver Dish by Saul Bellow.tbx (254.4 KB)

Finally, I asked Claude to link the TBX file to the current home thought in TheBrain so that I could locate it easily:

make an attribute in the note “A Silver Dish - Summary” called URLtheBrain and store in it a url link to the current home thought in TheBrain

This worked fine to create a URL link in my home thought in TheBrain, though I’m still troubleshooting how to create the attribute in TBX.

So–still a work in progress; but this is a tremendous boon to interoperability with Tinderbox!

2

If you want Claude to create attributes in Tinderbox, you may need to explain to Claude how to do that. It will need to use its do tool to perform the action createAttribute("attribute_name"). That’s not part of the standard Tinderbox syntax briefing, but you could always add it.

1 Like
3

is there a post on the forum already that explains exactly how to go about adding it?

4

AI/MCP use with Tinderbox is being explored on the Backstage [sic] only at present though, bar unexpected problems, it is likely to come to a new general release soon. Meanwhile, as beta features are not discussed here, your question is best parked for the while. As to Claude and The Brain, see the top post above.

5

Which license model do you need from Claude.ai to be able to use it for these tasks? I watched the Tinderbox Meetup on this topic yesterday and it was very interesting.

Andreas

6

I believe you need the lowest paid tier. Has anyone tried it with the current free plan?

1 Like
7

yes, the free plan works as well

1 Like
8

Thanks for the information; I thought that was the case, but it’s good to confirm!