Introduction
What a Kosmico project is, where your files live, and what changes between the desktop and web apps.
Kosmico is one workspace for the whole of a research project: the papers, the draft, the data, the code, and an AI assistant that can read and change all of it.
A project is a folder
When you create a project you point Kosmico at a folder on your machine. That folder becomes the project root. Nothing is copied and nothing is moved, and the files stay exactly where they were, in the formats they were already in. Markdown stays Markdown, .tex stays .tex, and you can open any of it in another tool at any time.
This is the difference that shapes everything else. Kosmico is a lens over a directory you own, not a silo you upload into.
Cloud sync is a choice, per project
A project can stay entirely local. Turn on cloud sync and its files replicate so you can open the project from another machine or from the web app, and so collaborators can join it. You can exclude individual folders from sync, which is the usual way to keep a data/ directory or a virtualenv out of the cloud while the rest of the project syncs.
Desktop and web
The web app runs in the browser and covers reading, writing, chat, research, and collaboration. The desktop app adds everything that needs your machine:
| Feature | Desktop | Web |
|---|---|---|
| Local project folders | Yes | Cloud-synced projects only |
| Terminal | Yes | No |
| Jupyter kernels | Yes | No |
| Integrated Browser | Yes | Opens an external browser tab |
| Local MCP server | Yes | No |
| Local models via Ollama | Yes | No |
| Local OCR | Yes | No |
The desktop app is available for macOS on Apple Silicon and Intel, and for Windows on x64.
Kosmo
Kosmo is the assistant. It reads and writes the files in the project, runs commands when you allow it, searches the literature, and can work on several things at once as separate agents. Every page in the Kosmo section is about some part of that.