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Every answer in VirtualBrain comes from the Mainframe. You ask a question in Chat or run an App, and the Mainframe works out what the request needs, gathers it, and hands the material to the step that writes your answer. You never configure it. It is worth understanding, though, because knowing what it can reach tells you what to ask for.

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What it can reach

The Mainframe has four capabilities and picks whichever the request calls for.

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How it decides what to do

The Mainframe reads your request and works out what it needs before touching anything.
1

It plans the retrieval

Independent lookups run at the same time. Dependent ones run in order, so it can pull the evaluation criteria out of your document first, then search the web against those criteria.
2

It keeps going until it has enough

A first pass that comes back thin triggers another, more targeted one. It does not stop at the first result it finds.
3

It skips retrieval when nothing is needed

A greeting, a conversational follow-up, or an instruction to restructure an answer it has already produced is handled directly, with no search.
Faced with an ambiguous request, it errs toward gathering more context rather than less. Retrieving a document that turns out to be irrelevant costs you nothing; missing one costs you an incomplete answer.

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It shows its work

Each capability the Mainframe uses appears as its own card in the conversation while the answer is still being written, listing the documents or pages it consulted. Open any of them mid-run to see what it found. That is what makes the final answer checkable: every claim carries a citation you can open, and the cards above it show how the material was gathered in the first place.

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It works from your context

Every run carries the context you have already set, so you don’t restate it:
  • Your firm’s Company Context on every run, plus your personal My Instructions in Chat. An App run carries only the Company Context
  • What VirtualBrain remembers about how you work (Memory Insights), and in Chat the conversation so far
  • The Brains, files, and web setting you chose for this question

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Where it runs

The Mainframe powers both halves of the platform, and the capabilities are identical in each.

In Chat

One run per question, with follow-ups reusing what the previous run gathered

In Apps

One run per block, so a single App can move from your documents, to the web, to a calculation
Anything that works in a Chat works inside an App block. When you build an App, you are choosing which capability each block leans on and what material it starts from. See App Blocks for how that is configured, and the Academy for how to design it well.

Sourced Answers

How citations work and how to verify a claim against its source

Asking Questions

Choose what grounds an answer before you ask