Composer
The Composer is Mantis’s AI chat panel. It sits inside the workspace, sees the space and map you are working in, and answers by calling Mantis tools: it can inspect points and clusters, search, compare sets, create bags, recolor the map, and write into a chat notebook. It was previously called MantisGPT; the panel now ships as Composer.
- Panel
- Composer
- View menu
- Agents
- Modes
- orchestrator, ask, visual tour
Where to find it
Open View → Agents → Composer. It is also part of the Default layout preset, docked at the top left next to Bags.
The Composer is bound to the space you have open. It picks up the active map from the workspace, so a question about “this cluster” resolves against the map you are looking at.
The empty state
A new chat opens on a greeting, a large input box, and a row of quick-start pills: Explore, Analyze, Visualize, Organize, and Demo. Clicking a pill expands three concrete prompts built from your live context. If you have points, a cluster, or a bag selected, the prompts name that selection. If nothing is selected, they name real cluster labels and field names from the current map instead of placeholders.
Inside an expanded pill, Generate AI ideas asks the backend for additional prompt options for that category. It is opt-in and best effort: the request is cancelled after 12 seconds and, if it fails, the three deterministic options stay exactly as they were. Clicking any option appends it to the input rather than replacing what you have typed.
The input
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| + | Opens the attachment menu: Add files, Add picture (disabled, marked Soon), Add space. |
| Mode selector | Picks the Composer mode. See below. |
| Globe | All Spaces Mode, on or off. While it is on, the mode selector is disabled. |
| KG | Knowledge graph mode. The control only appears when the active map has a knowledge graph, and the label reads On (IterE), On (GraphFusion), or Off. |
| Microphone | Dictation through the browser’s speech recognition, English only. Ctrl+M toggles it. It transcribes into the input and never speaks back, and it is disabled in browsers without speech recognition. |
| Map icon | Map navigation on or off. On, agent tool calls focus the canvas and create bags. Off, you chat without canvas side effects. The choice is remembered in the browser. |
| Up arrow | Send. While a turn is generating, it becomes a stop button. |
A token counter appears to the left of these controls once the conversation has context to count.
Two input shortcuts are worth knowing:
- Type @ to mention a bag or a cluster. The dropdown lists them across every open map, colored by the bag or cluster color, and the mention is inserted as a colored chip.
- Press ⇧+⇥ to drop your current map selection into the message when the selection strip above the input is showing.
Modes
The mode list is served by the backend, so the dropdown always reflects what the server will actually enforce. There are three public modes.
orchestrator is the default. It gets the full Mantis assistant: every MCP tool, workflow tools, note and task tools, skills, external app integrations, and web search. It also receives container and notebook context.
ask is read-only. It is restricted to the non-mutating tools (get_space_context, inspect, search, intersect, diff, union, compare, export) and has workflows, note and task tools, skills, external app integrations, and web search all disabled. Use it when you want an answer about the space without anything in the space changing.
visual tour has the same tools as orchestrator, but the model answers with a structured tour of the map instead of prose. See Visual tours.
Heads up
The mode selector only governs the Composer models. If you have selected an agent runtime such as Opencode, the selector disappears and the mode is not applied at all. See Agent runtimes.
Changing the mode reconnects the chat socket so the server rebuilds the agent with the new tool policy. The selector is also hidden in chats bound to a custom agent or team, and disabled while All Spaces Mode is on.
There is a fourth mode, benchmark, in the backend. It is used for benchmark runs and is not offered in the dropdown.
Tools it can call
In orchestrator and visual tour modes, the Composer can call the full Mantis MCP surface:
- Read:
get_space_context,inspect(the universal read over anymantis://URI),search,compare,export. - Set logic:
intersect,diff,union. - Bags:
create_bag,add_to_bag,remove_from_bag,rename_bag,delete_bag,filter_to_bag. - Map and plots:
legend_command,set_plot_variables. - Spaces and maps:
create_space,create_map_from_url,modify_map_from_url,create_map_from_workspace_csv. - Notebook: add, edit, delete, and execute cells, plus
create_page.
Tool calls render inline in the transcript. Repeated calls to the same tool collapse into one group you can expand, and each call has a View full output control that opens the raw result in a modal.
Citations
The agent refers to things in your space with mantis:// URIs, for example mantis://map/<map_id>/point/<point_id>. The Composer renders those as colored chips carrying the point, cluster, or bag color from the map. Clicking a chip navigates to that object; hovering previews it. Point citations also populate flashcards on the map automatically as they stream in, so cited points get a live preview without you clicking anything.
Files the agent produced in the workspace are cited as @cite/agent_files/... and render as file chips, or as inline images when the file is an image.
The eye button in the panel header toggles Show references and Hide references. Hiding strips the citation chips out of the rendered text.
Slash commands
Type / at the start of the message box to open the command menu. Arrow keys move, Tab or Enter selects, Escape closes. Two commands ship today:
- /summarize compresses the conversation’s context on the server to save tokens.
- /ansatz replaces the workspace with the Ansatz reasoning terminal. See Ansatz.
Attachments
+ → Add files accepts .pdf, .csv, .txt, .xlsx, and .xls. You can also drag files onto the panel. Uploads go into the chat’s container under /home/user/uploads, which means a chat has to exist first: dropping files before you have sent a message shows “Start a chat first”. Picture upload is present in the menu but disabled.
File upload is turned off entirely in chats bound to a custom agent or team.
+ → Add space attaches other spaces to the conversation. Attached spaces appear as badges above the input, and the selection is sent to the backend as you change it.
Follow-up suggestions
After a turn completes, a Suggested follow-ups card appears just above the input. The suggestions arrive one of two ways: the backend sends a suggestions event, or the model ends its reply with a <<<FOLLOWUPS>>> block that the client strips out of the visible message and renders as chips. Clicking a chip appends it to your input. The X dismisses the card for that set.
Visual tours
In visual tour mode, the reply is a tour document rather than prose. The message renders as a short card with an Open tour button, and a dock appears at the bottom of the window.
The dock shows the tour title, the current step and its narration, Step n / N, and the map the step belongs to. Controls are previous, next, + and - map zoom (clamped to the tour’s own zoom range), and minimize. Minimizing leaves a Resume tour strip with your position preserved.
Each step is applied to the map automatically as you reach it. A step can narrate, focus a point, focus a cluster, focus a bag, or clear highlights, focus, and selection. Steps that need a map but do not name one report “This step requires a map_id” instead of doing something arbitrary.
Chats, models, and the sidebar
The header has the sidebar toggle, New chat, and the model dropdown. The sidebar lists your previous chats with delete and load-more, plus Explore Nymphs (the shared agent catalog) and Settings, which opens Memories.
When a chat has produced a notebook, a Canvas button appears in the header and opens the notebook as an analysis report.
What it does not do
- It does not run arbitrary code from the chat box. Code runs through the notebook tools or in the agent’s container, which you can inspect from the Agent workspace panels.
- The microphone is dictation only. Nothing is read back to you.
- Ask mode’s restrictions are enforced by the backend for Composer models only. They are not applied to agent runtimes.
- Suggestions, quick-start AI ideas, and tours are best effort. A failed request leaves the previous state standing rather than showing an error.