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Protos is Aris Machina's AI-native R&D workspace for designing and industrializing complex physical systems. It connects first-principles models, experiments, and institutional knowledge into a single, traceable environment — from concept through manufacturing handoff.

Getting Started

The Co-Engineer can help throughout your workflow. It can create schemas, populate data documents, build canvases, and search the Knowledge Library — all from a chat. Use it as much or as little as you like alongside the features directly.

Go to protos.arismachina.com. With no project yet you land on the Co-Engineer, in the same chat window you'll use from then on: tell it what you want to create, and sending that message creates your first project and kicks off guided onboarding. Example projects sit below the composer — opening one shows it read-only, so you can look without starting anything.
From that description, the Co-Engineer works through five steps, one per turn — a starter schema, a data document from it, an entry in the Knowledge Library, a guided stop at the Models Library, and a starter canvas in Simulation Studio.
When the five steps are done, click Complete onboarding to finish. It appears in the chat once you've moved past the last step — by sending a message of your own, or by finishing the Simulation Studio tour — and in the sidebar throughout that final step. Onboarding then hands off to the general-purpose Co-Engineer so you can keep building or adjust anything it set up.

Before you have a project

Nearly everything in Protos hangs off a project, so until you have one the feature links in the sidebar are greyed out. A card at the top of the sidebar always says why, and which one you get depends on where you are:

Card	When you see it	Where it takes you
Create a project	You have no projects at all	The project library
Start with Co-Engineer	You've signed up but haven't sent a first message, and you've navigated away from the home screen	Back to the Co-Engineer home
Choose a project	You have projects but none is selected — typically a bookmark or an emailed link opened on a new browser	The project library
Continue Onboarding	Guided onboarding is still in progress	Back to the Co-Engineer to finish the remaining steps

Delete your last project and you land back on the project library with the Create a project card waiting.

Project Overview

A Project is your central workspace in Protos. It brings together all artifacts related to a design or R&D campaign — designs, test data, simulations, models, and decisions — in a single, connected canvas.

Key Concepts

Concept	Description
Canvas	A graph of connected blocks (parameters, inputs, calculations, models, visualizations). Data flows through the chain automatically.
Traceability	Field values created by the Co-Engineer link back to the Knowledge Library source they came from.
PSPP	The reasoning framework underlying Protos: Process → Structure → Property → Performance.

Creating a Project

Setup runs as a short wizard — Name → Details → Data → Configure — and once the project exists you can click any step in the progress bar to jump back to it. Your progress is saved, so a setup you leave part-way through picks up where you stopped.

Click Create new project. Add a name and description.
Details — answer a few questions about the project, one at a time. Each is generated from your name and description, with clickable suggested answers you can take or type over. The first — "What are you trying to achieve in this project?" — sets the goal. Later questions are marked (optional) and have a Skip button, and Skip in the footer moves past the whole step.
Data — optionally bring in what you already have, grouped into three panels: BOM, Materials & supplier data, and Simulation & design candidates. Each panel's Ingest data menu takes Files or a Folder from your device, imports From SharePoint or From GitHub, or pulls in existing Knowledge library documents and Data documents. Leave any panel empty to skip it. A drop zone at the bottom takes any other supporting documents — drag files or a whole folder onto it, or use its Files and Folder buttons. A folder keeps its structure rather than arriving as a pile of loose files. File types Protos can't read are left out and named for you, as are any files over 100 MB.
Configure — the Co-Engineer sets up your workspace and drafts a kickoff plan from everything you gave it. You land on the new project with the plan waiting as a pill in the chat: Run it as drafted, Edit it first, or dismiss it and start on your own.

Finding an Existing Project

The project switcher in the header — click your current project's name — is available from every page, and lists projects you own alongside those shared with you. Which actions a row offers depends on your role on that project; see Projects shared with you.

At the bottom of the switcher, click Browse all projects (only shown while its search box is empty) to open the full project library, where you can:

Filter by Mine, Shared with me, Public, or All, with live counts on each tab
Search by name, description, tags, or domain
See which project is currently active (marked Active with a highlighted border) and set another one active
Open a project, or as its owner, upload a cover image or Delete it
On the Public tab, clone an Aris-published example project as a starting point

Navigating the Canvas

Action	How
Zoom in/out	Scroll or pinch — inspect blocks or see the full picture
Open a block	Click it to view its properties, inputs, and results
Filter	Filter bar: parameter, Data input, calculation, model, or visualization
Search	Search across all blocks by name

Features at a Glance

Schemas

Define the structure of your engineering data. Instead of disconnected spreadsheets, schemas give every artifact a consistent, queryable shape — reusable across all projects and connectable to external tools.

Use schemas for: designs, test data, model parameterizations, operating conditions, and data extracted from external files via the Co-Engineer.

→ Schemas guide

Data Studio

Your workbench for managing and comparing design data before running a simulation. Pick a schema, select which data documents to activate, and the canvas picks them up automatically. Includes side-by-side comparison, inline editing, and charting across document variants.

→ Data Studio guide

Simulation Studio

Build and run calculation canvases — connect your data to models and calculations, and see results update automatically. Supports Python calculations, external models, parameter sweeps, and in-canvas visualization.

→ Simulation Studio guide

Design of Experiments

Spend a limited budget of experiments where they buy the most information. Mark what you're chasing and what you're free to vary, and each round recommends the next batch from everything measured so far — whether the results come from a simulation canvas, a formula, or a lab bench.

→ Design of Experiments guide

Model Library

A registry of all computational models in your workspace — physics models, ML models, kinetic models, and custom scripts. Register once, reuse across any project, with full version history.

→ Models Library guide

Knowledge Library

Protos's institutional memory. Every decision, data point, and reference is captured and linked to the design artifacts that used it — so nothing is lost between projects or team members.

What lives here: academic papers, internal reports, decisions and rationale, experimental results, AI-surfaced connections.

→ Knowledge Library guide

Co-Engineer

An AI assistant available across all features. It accelerates work by structuring data, configuring simulations, and surfacing connections that would otherwise take hours to find manually — always with traceable sources.

→ Co-Engineer guide

MCP Connections

Connect external tools — e.g. Notion, Linear, or Atlassian — to the Co-Engineer. Once connected, the Co-Engineer can use those tools directly in chat without you switching tabs. Found under Integrations in the sidebar, not as a top-level page.

→ MCP Connections guide

A cross-cutting capability, not a page of its own — share canvases, schemas, data documents, models, and Co-Engineer chats from each resource's own Share dialog. Two sharing roles: Editor (can co-edit in place, on some resource types) and Viewer (read-only). The resource creator is always the owner. Organise teammates into teams or share with your whole community. Publications is a separate feature that lets you publish canvases as interactive snapshots for external stakeholders.

→ Collaboration & Sharing guide

Versioning

Schemas, canvases, models, data documents, and knowledge documents all keep a version history — view past versions and restore one if a change turns out to be wrong.

→ Versioning guide

Integrations

Integrations are accessible from the Integrations section in the left sidebar.

System	What Protos does
SharePoint	Browse and import files and folders into the Knowledge Library
GitHub	Register computational models (Python, scripts) from a repo into the Models Library
MCP servers	Connect external tools to the Co-Engineer so it can use them directly in chat
Register a Model	Register external computational models into the Model Library

Note: GitHub is for model registration only — not for importing data into schemas. See Model Library for details.

Your Account

Click your name or avatar at the bottom of the left sidebar and choose Billing & Usage. That page holds your subscription and your account settings:

Card	What you can do
Subscription	See your current plan and trial status. Subscribe to Pro opens Stripe Checkout, which collects your full billing address for invoicing and tax. Change Plan and Manage Subscription open the Stripe customer portal.
Refer friends, earn free Pro	Share a referral link — a referred signup gets a longer trial, and so do you.
Email preferences	Turn Marketing emails on or off. Account emails — sign-in, security, and billing notices — are always sent.
Display name	Set or change the name shown across the app — in the user menu and on your avatar. The card tells you the current one, and the button reads Change name (or Set name if you haven't set one).
Password	Change password. Accounts that sign in with Google don't have one to change, and the card says so instead.

The same page has a Danger Zone for deleting your account.

New accounts start on a 15-day Pro trial with no card required — 30 days if you were referred. There is no free tier behind it, so subscribe before it ends to keep working.

What's new

The same user menu has What's new — a searchable history of everything shipped, with the full changelog alongside it. Click any entry to read the detail, and Check it out takes you straight to the feature. Browsing never marks an update as read, so anything you haven't seen yet still appears in the pop-up.

Glossary Quick Reference

Term	Definition
Canvas	The visual graph workspace connecting all project nodes
Design freeze	The point at which a validated design is locked for handoff — achieved in Protos by publishing a canvas snapshot
Node	A block on the canvas — parameter, input, calculation, model, or visualization
PSPP	Process → Structure → Property → Performance
Schema	A defined structure for a type of engineering data
Sweep	A single run that varies one or more parameters across a range, returning an output surface
TRL	Technology Readiness Level — Protos is optimized for TRL 0–3
Trace	The ability to follow any value back to its original source

→ Full Glossary

Maintained by Aris Machina