AgentLab is releasing MindForum, a new shared AI workspace for small-group brainstorming. It answers a question that most AI chat tools get wrong: how do you bring an AI teammate into a group conversation without letting it dominate?
Silent by Default
In typical AI chat, every human message gets an AI response. That works for one person—but for a group, it kills conversation. People stop talking to each other because the AI is always talking first.
MindForum flips the pattern. The AI is a participant in the room, but it’s silent by default. It only responds when someone mentions it with @ai. The rest of the time, the humans talk to each other—the way a brainstorm is supposed to work.
What’s in a Room
- Link-gated access — create a room, share the link, and anyone with it can join with a name and email. The link is the access control; 2–6 participants is the comfortable range.
- Live group chat — messages stream over Server-Sent Events, so everyone sees new contributions as they happen.
- Document context — upload PDF, DOCX, TXT, or MD. The server parses and caches the text; check a file to feed it to the AI as context when you invoke it.
- One-click project brief — turn the conversation into a structured brief with themes, outline, risks, next steps, and collaborator list. Posted back to the thread for everyone to see.
Stack: Next.js 15, React 19, TypeScript, OpenAI API, in-memory store. Deploys to a single VPS as a single long-lived Node process. View on GitHub →
Where It Fits
MindForum is designed for short, focused brainstorms—the kind that happen before a project kicks off or when a small team needs to think through a problem together. The silent-by-default AI is a research collaborator, not a chat partner: it brings documents into the conversation, summarizes when asked, and turns the messy discussion into an artifact the group can take forward.
Visit the MindForum project page for more on the architecture and deployment.