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First Launch

When you open BaseLayer for the first time, you’ll walk through a short setup process.

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Sign in

Choose how to create your account:
  • Email magic link: enter your email address, then click the link sent to your inbox
  • GitHub OAuth: sign in with your GitHub account
  • Google OAuth: sign in with your Google account

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Set your passphrase

You’ll create a vault passphrase to encrypt your knowledge vault.
We can’t recover your passphrase. If you lose it, your vault can’t be decrypted. Choose something strong and memorable, and store it in a password manager.
Your passphrase never leaves your device. We use it to derive encryption keys locally (PBKDF2 with 600,000 iterations, if you’re curious).

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Telemetry opt-in

BaseLayer asks if you’d like to share anonymous usage analytics. This helps us improve the product. You can change this anytime in Settings → Privacy. No conversation content is ever included in telemetry. Only aggregate usage patterns like feature adoption and error rates.

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Device setup

BaseLayer registers your Mac as a device on your account. This allows you to use multiple devices with the same vault (synced via encrypted relay).

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Import wizard

The setup wizard will ask if you’d like to import existing conversation history from:
  • Claude: upload your data export ZIP
  • ChatGPT: upload your data export ZIP
You can skip this step and import later from Settings → Import Data.
Even if you skip the import, BaseLayer starts capturing new conversations immediately once the Chrome extension or IDE watcher is active.

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You’re ready

After setup, BaseLayer runs in the background. You’ll see the menu bar icon indicating it’s active. Next steps: