Getting started

Install & authenticate

The Sciento CLI is the fastest way to interact with your workspace from a terminal or notebook. It works on macOS, Linux, and Windows (WSL).

# macOS / Linux
curl -sSL https://get.scientohq.com | bash

# Authenticate (opens browser)
sciento login

Workspaces

A workspace is the unit of isolation in Sciento. Everything (agents, memory, integrations, evals, billing) is scoped to a workspace. A typical lab uses one workspace per research programme.

sciento workspace create "hct116-program"
sciento workspace use    "hct116-program"

Your first workflow

The simplest possible workflow: read today's literature, rank it, post to Slack.

sciento run literature.triage \
  --topics "Wnt signalling, CTNNB1, colorectal cancer" \
  --since 24h \
  --notify slack(#discovery)

You will see four agent steps in your dashboard: planner, executor, verifier, writer. Each is independently auditable.

Agents

Sciento agents are bounded, retryable programs that run inside a durable Temporal workflow. They communicate over a shared scratchpad and a long-term memory. Each agent has an explicit role, a tool allowlist, and a verifier that can reject its output.

Tools & MCP

Tools are functions agents can call. They include built-in primitives (search PubMed, design primers, query BigQuery), customer-installed integrations (Benchling, Slack), and custom MCP servers. Permissions are enforced at the tool boundary, not at the agent boundary.

Evals

Every workflow ships with at least one eval set. You can bring your own golden datasets and run them on demand or on every release.

sciento evals run literature.triage --suite my-golden-set

Recipe: Literature triage

A robust daily triage with custom ranking weights.

sciento.create_workflow(
  name="daily_triage",
  trigger="cron(0 7 * * 1-5)",
  steps=[
    Read(sources=["pubmed", "biorxiv"], since="24h"),
    Rank(weights={"novelty": 0.4, "reproducibility": 0.4, "relevance": 0.2}),
    Write(to=Slack("#discovery"), template="morning_digest"),
  ],
)

Recipe: Methods drafting

Read your ELN, produce a journal-ready Methods section, queue for human review.

Recipe: CRISPR sgRNA design

Validated against UCSC hg38, off-targets checked via Cas-OFFinder, packaged as an Excel order sheet for IDT.

Last updated 2026-05-22 · View changelog →

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