Write a book with Ario

One page, one button, and a value you see only once.

1. 1.

   Make an account. Sign up if you have not. The same account keeps your reading; writing is the other half of it.

2. 2.

   Open agent access. Go to /settings, name the key after whatever will be holding it, like “Claude on my laptop”, and create it.

3. 3.

   Copy it straight away. It begins ario_live_ and is shown exactly once. Ario stores only a one-way digest, so nobody can read it back to you afterwards, us included.

Keys carry separate permissions to read, write, publish and delete, expire on their own schedule, and can be revoked without touching your account.

One address and one header, wherever your assistant keeps its settings.

All three want the same two things: the address https://www.ario.fyi/api/mcp, and your key sent as an Authorization header.

claude mcp add --transport http ario https://www.ario.fyi/api/mcp \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer ario_live_EXAMPLEkeyNOTREALreplaceWithTheOneYouCopied"

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ario": {
      "url": "https://www.ario.fyi/api/mcp",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer ario_live_EXAMPLEkeyNOTREALreplaceWithTheOneYouCopied" }
    }
  }
}

A deck, a doc, a PDF, the notes you keep re-explaining from.

Most books here start as something else. Give the file to your assistant, not to Ario: Claude, Codex and Gemini can all read what is on your machine, and Ario only needs the result.

How the file gets in front of it differs by client, and it is the only fiddly part. Slides are the awkward case: export Keynote or PowerPoint to PDF first, so the assistant reads the words rather than a zip of XML.

cd ~/work/onboarding
claude

Read onboarding-deck.pdf.

Using the Ario tools, make it a book for engineers
joining the team in their first week.
Show me the shape before you build anything.

[attach onboarding-deck.pdf]

Using the Ario tools, make this a book for engineers
joining the team in their first week.
Show me the shape before you build anything.

Expect it to reshape rather than transcribe. A deck is bullets that were finished out loud by whoever presented it, and a book has to say those parts. What comes back will be longer than the deck in the places you used to talk, and shorter wherever a slide was there to fill a minute.

Charts and diagrams from the original can come across as pictures, once they are uploaded. A figure redrawn with Ario’s own plates will read better than a screenshot of a slide, so it is worth asking which of them could be rebuilt rather than pasted.

The part that is a conversation rather than a procedure.

Describe what you want understood, and by whom. Ario’s books are three levels deep: the question, the parts that answer it, and how each part works. Saying that at the start saves a round trip.

Quicker still, if one fits: name a sample. A course unit, a post-mortem, an objection doc. Read the one nearest what you are making and ask for the same thing about your subject. Your assistant can read it too, so naming it is enough.

Using the Ario tools, draft a book called
"How does a vaccine actually work?"

Three levels: the question, four parts that answer it,
and four sections inside each part.
Write for someone with no biology past school.
Short chapters. Two minutes at the top level.
Show me the shape before you build anything.

Ask for the shape first, and read it. Rearranging four chapter titles in a chat costs nothing; rearranging a built book costs a rebuild. Once the outline is right, tell it to go ahead and it will create the book and everything inside it in one pass.

What Ario draws for itself, and what has to come from you.

Ario draws its own figures, from a fixed set of plates: scoreboards, dials, sequences, cutaways, graphs. The assistant picks one to suit what it is saying, and most of the time you can leave it to.

When it picks badly, or you already know the shape the idea wants, name it. The design system has every plate on one page with an example of each, so the useful instruction is usually a sentence: make that a dial the reader can drag, or show the two side by side rather than in a list.

Photographs and clips are the other half, and those it cannot invent. An assistant has no pictures of its own, and the one thing it must never do is reach for a stranger’s image to fill a figure. That is a book which breaks when somebody else reorganises their site, so it can only use what you give it.

Upload at /settings : pictures, GIFs, video, and caption files. Then ask the assistant to list what is there; it will use those and nothing else, and it can write the descriptions that become alt text for you.

Where it appears, and who can see it.

A new book is private to your workspace and gets its own address, made from its title. Ask for the preview link, read the whole thing, and send it back for changes as many times as it takes.

Nothing you make is public until you say so. When it is ready, ask it to publish. Ask it to make the book private again and it comes straight back off the shelf. Publishing is a setting, not a one-way door.