Quick Start

Capture a paper, compile it, and cite it — in under 30 seconds.

1. Capture

Download an arXiv paper and extract metadata:

crossmem capture https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762

Output:

[capture] arxiv_id: 1706.03762
[capture] title: Attention Is All You Need
[capture] cite_key: vaswani2017attention
[capture] saved to ~/crossmem/raw/...

2. Compile

Parse the PDF into chunks and run the LLM pass:

crossmem compile vaswani2017attention

This produces a wiki note at ~/crossmem/wiki/<timestamp>_vaswani2017attention.md with:

• YAML frontmatter (title, authors, year, DOI, cite_key)
• Five citation formats (APA, MLA, Chicago, IEEE, BibTeX)
• Per-chunk verbatim quotes with paraphrase, implication, and provenance metadata

3. Cite via MCP

Add crossmem to Claude Code:

claude mcp add crossmem -- crossmem mcp serve

Then ask Claude:

Cite vaswani2017attention in APA format.

Claude calls crossmem_cite and returns:

Vaswani, A., & Shazeer, N. (2017). Attention Is All You Need. arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.03762.

4. Search your wiki

Ask Claude:

What do I have on self-attention mechanisms?

Claude calls crossmem_recall and returns matching excerpts ranked by relevance, with cite keys and deep links to your wiki files.