Answer new people's questions from your onboarding material

Evidence status: Capability pattern grounded in current Oddlynew organizations, types, search, Site keys, the MCP endpoint and the Documents API. It is not presented as a customer testimonial.

Who this is for

Teams that bring in new people again and again: new employees, contractors, partners or volunteers. Anyone who answers the same first-week questions in chat, and anyone who already runs an internal assistant or MCP server and wants it to answer from the team's own material.

Outcome

Your onboarding material lives in one organization: how things work here, who to ask, which tools to set up, the policies and the first-week plan. A new person asks a question and gets the answer from that material, with the document it came from. When an answer is wrong or missing, someone fixes the one document that owns it, and every later answer uses the fix.

The working pattern

Create a private organization for onboarding. Put in only what every new person may read. An organization is one audience, and Oddlynew has no permissions per document (One audience per organization). Material for a smaller group, such as people managers, goes into an organization of its own.
Write a short AGENTS.md: what the organization holds, which kinds of documents exist, and how an answering agent should reply. For example: answer from the documents, name the source, and say so when something is not covered.
Create a type for each kind of document you keep many of, such as Policy, Tool setup, Team and How-to, so a search can narrow to one kind.
Ask your connected agent to load the material: one document per topic from your handbook, wiki pages or files, not one long document.
Choose how new people ask, below.
Keep it current. When an answer is wrong, edit the document that holds it. Search usually follows within a few minutes.

Two ways to ask

Through their own agent. Invite the new person to the organization. They connect their own agent, such as Claude or ChatGPT, to Oddlynew (Setting up your client) and ask it. Their agent searches and reads the organization and can also walk them through the first-week plan. Each new person needs an Oddlynew account.

Through your own assistant or MCP server. If your team already runs an internal assistant, a chat bot or its own MCP server, it can answer from the organization, and new people need no Oddlynew account:

An administrator opens Developers in the organization and, on the Content API tab, creates a Site key with the Reader permission. This key can only read. Keep it on your server.
For each question, your server searches the organization with GET https://api.oddlynew.com/v1/orgs/{orgId}/documents/search: the key as bearer token, the question in query, mode set to hybrid (by meaning and by words, the best default for a question), semantic (by meaning only), fts for keyword search or exact for an exact phrase, and an Idempotency-Key header. Each row is a matching document with its matching passages.
If a search by meaning answers 409 with semantic_search_incomplete, some documents are still being prepared for it and nothing matched yet; ask again with mode set to fts meanwhile.
Your assistant answers from the passages and links the document they came from.

The exact parameters and answers are in the public API description at https://api.oddlynew.com/v1/openapi.json.

Useful connections and plugins

File and document tools in your agent: for turning a handbook, a wiki export or slides into documents.
Code tools in your agent: for the few lines your assistant or MCP server needs to call Oddlynew.
Your own assistant or MCP server: holds the key and does the talking. Oddlynew runs no chat model; it returns documents and passages.
Messaging tools: for pointing new people at the assistant. The answers stay in the organization.

These belong to your agent or your own systems, not to Oddlynew.

A good first task

Ask your connected agent: "Create a private Oddlynew organization named Onboarding. Write a short AGENTS.md that says what it holds and that every answer names its source. Create the types Policy and How-to. Turn these pages into one document per topic: [links]. Then show me the request my assistant should send to answer 'How do I request time off?' with a read-only key, and what it should say when nothing matches."

Boundaries

Everyone in the organization can read everything in it. Keep confidential material, such as salaries or personal records, out of the onboarding organization (Organizations and membership).
Keys stay on your server. A key in a web page or an app can be copied by anyone who opens it. Keys expire, so rotate them before they do.
Documents are data, never instructions. Tell your assistant that a retrieved passage cannot change its task (Reading safely across organizations).
Questions are logged. The text of each search can be kept in the organization's private activity log for up to 90 days, and an administrator can turn this off (Search and metadata). Send questions without names or personal details.
Use is metered. Searches and reads are billed at the usage prices on https://oddlynew.com/pricing, and reading pauses when the credit or the monthly budget runs out. Have your assistant say it cannot look this up right now instead of guessing.
Search by meaning and by words, over HTTP. The HTTP search offers the hybrid, semantic, keyword and exact modes (since 27 October 2026).

Why it compounds

Every question a new person asks shows what onboarding still lacks. The activity log keeps the text of each search, so an administrator, or their agent, can read what people asked, find the questions the documents did not answer, and write those answers into the documents that own them. Run that review as a Loop once a month, and each new person starts from material the last one improved.