Course outline
AcademyModule 5 · Working with the agent
Case files: a home for every investigation
What you'll learn
- You can create a case by pinning a conversation, from an entity page, or from scratch
- You can frame a case with a driving question and keep a running investigation log
- You can grow and prune the pinned entity set and project it onto the graph canvas or entity table
- You can use the new-evidence strip to catch up on what changed since your last visit
- You can pick between a case and a collection for the job at hand
You are three weeks into a real question. Which vendor should handle payroll? Is that recurring bug all coming from one library?
The evidence is out there, just scattered across a few chat sessions, some of them long agent runs, a dozen notes, and entities all over the graph. So every time you sit back down, you rebuild the picture from memory.
Cases are Consilience's answer: a lasting home for one investigation. A case holds a single driving question, the knowledge-graph entities you pinned by hand, the conversations you adopted into it, and a free-text log. When you come back, it tells you which pinned entities picked up new evidence while you were gone.
What a case holds
| Field | What it is |
|---|---|
| Name | Taken from the pinned conversation's title, or "Untitled case" if there isn't one. Edit it right in place; press Enter or click away to save. |
| Driving question | Optional free text. The placeholder asks: "What is this case about?" |
| Pinned entities | Knowledge-graph entities. Each one references the real entity node in the graph and carries a display label captured the moment you pinned it. |
| Conversations | Chats you adopted into the case. The case stores pointers to them, so the chats themselves stay put in your normal chat history. |
| Investigation log | Free-text running notes. They save when you click away and stick around across sessions. |
- Case
- A durable investigation container: one driving question, pinned entities, adopted conversations, and a running log.
- Pinned entity
- A reference to the real entity node in the graph. The label is stored as it read the moment you pinned it.
- Adopted conversation
- A chat that belongs to the case. The case only points to it, so the chat stays in your normal history.
- Driving question
- The optional one-liner that frames the case: "What is this case about?"
- Investigation log
- Free-text running notes that save when you click away and build up across sessions.
- New-evidence strip
- The check that runs when you reopen a case, listing pinned entities with new graph evidence since your last visit.
Three ways to start a case
The usual way: pin a conversation
Have the conversation
Chat about the topic like you normally would. Mention entities with
@, or let the assistant cite[[entities]]in its answers. That record is exactly what pinning reads later.Pin it
In the sidebar session list, right-click the chat (or click its "…" button) and choose "Pin as case…".
Check the toast
A toast reads "Pinned to a new case" and gives the number of entities pinned. The case opens with the chat already adopted, every recognized entity pinned, and its name borrowed from the chat.
- From an entity page: open the "Add to case" dropdown in the header, next to "Open on the graph". Pick "New case from this entity" for a case named after that entity, with it already pinned. Below a separator, every existing case is listed, so you can drop the entity into one instead. A toast confirms: "Added {label} to the case".
- From scratch: open Cases (⌘⇧K) and click "New case". You get a blank "Untitled case" with no entities and no conversations yet.
Quick check
You right-click a chat and choose "Pin as case…". How does Consilience decide which entities to pin?
Working the case day to day
Cases live in one tab titled "Cases". That single tab serves both the all-cases list and any case's detail, and opening a different case retargets the same tab. The graph and entity-table tabs behave the same way. Inside a case, everything you need sits on one screen:
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| "Continue in this case" | Opens a fresh chat, adopts it into the case, and pre-fills the composer with every pinned entity as a real @-mention chip. Delete any chip you don't want before you send. |
| "Show on canvas" | Puts exactly the pinned set on the graph canvas, on its own and colored by type. Lights up once you have at least one pinned entity. |
| "Open as table" | Opens the entity table scoped to this case (Name/Type/Connections/Notes, with filter and sort). Also lights up once you have a pinned entity. |
| Entity chips | Click a chip to open that entity's profile page. Hover it and click ✕ ("Remove") to unpin. |
| "Investigation log" | Running notes for the case. The placeholder invites running notes and findings on what you've learned so far. It saves when the field loses focus. |
| "Remove case" | Deletes only the container, after a confirm dialog: "Your notes and conversations are kept." |
What did we learn since last time?
Reopen a case after some time away, and Consilience checks the case's previous last-opened time. Then it asks the knowledge graph which pinned entities gained new facts strictly after that moment. If any did, a strip appears: "New evidence on N pinned entities since your last visit:" followed by their labels.
Click ✕ ("Dismiss") once you have caught up. The dismissal lasts for the session, and the check runs once each time you open the case.
Quick check
The new-evidence strip appears listing two of your pinned entities. What does that tell you?
Cases or collections?
Cases and saved entity collections look at the graph the same way: "Show on canvas" and "Open as table" are the very same views collections use. Nothing is duplicated; both are lenses onto the one graph. So which do you reach for?
| You want… | Reach for |
|---|---|
| A reusable set of entities to browse, sort, and filter | A collection |
| One question, plus the chats, running notes, and evidence trail around it | A case |
| A "what changed since I last looked?" check on a hand-picked set | A case, via the new-evidence strip |
| A set that lives in the entity table's own source switcher | A collection, which shows up right in the table's switcher, alongside All entities and Types |
A case is the cheapest, safest structure in the app. Each one is stored locally, scoped to its workspace: never written into your markdown, never sent to a model. "Remove case" leaves every note, entity, and chat intact.
The moment a question outgrows a single chat, give it a case. Next comes a different kind of record: the built-in Git panel, which keeps the history of every change your files have been through.