> ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.synheart.ai/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # How Synapse works > The ideas behind Synapse, in plain words. Seats and roles, departments, human state and Life, the AI Effectiveness Index, the cohort floor, and how to read evidence labels Synapse sits between your engineering team and the AI tools it uses. Agents ask it about your rules and decisions before they act. Synapse also collects what those tools, your repositories and (with consent) your people's human state say about how AI work is going, and shows it back as team views. This page explains the ideas that come up on almost every screen. Once you know them, the rest of the docs read more easily. ## Seats and roles You need a **Synapse seat** in your organization to use Synapse. The organization owner or an organization admin gives out seats. Each seat comes with one Synapse role, and **the role decides what you can see and do**. Your role on the Synheart platform doesn't. | Role | What it adds | | - | - | | **Member** (the default) | Your own memory, decisions and **My Effectiveness**, your own department's team view, your own AI-tool connections, and your own Life connection and erasure. | | **Lead** | Everything a Member has, plus the whole organization's team views, AI usage, AI spend, goals and alerts, and exports. | | **Admin** | Everything a Lead has, plus connectors, knowledge sources, MCP tokens, departments, rules, the audit log and the privacy settings. | The organization owner can do everything, but only with a seat, like everyone else. A few things never need a seat: the owner and organization admins can change privacy settings, any member can [erase their own data](https://docs.synheart.ai/synapse/team-views.md#erasing-data), and only the owner can erase the whole organization's data. > [!TIP] > > If a page you expect is missing from your sidebar, your role probably doesn't include it. Ask a Synapse Admin. See [Find your way around](https://docs.synheart.ai/synapse/navigate.md) for what each role sees. ## Departments and scope A **department** is a group of members, such as Platform or Mobile. Admins create departments and add people to them under **Departments**. Every team view has a **scope**, shown as a badge at the top of the page. Members see their own department. Leads and Admins see the whole organization and can pick any department. In an organization with no departments yet, the whole organization is everyone's team. That changes as soon as the first department exists. ## Human state and Life **Human state** is a coarse estimate of how someone is doing at work, such as focus, cognitive load and fatigue. It comes from **Life by Synheart**, which each person connects for themselves under **You → My connections**. * **It's opt-in.** Nobody's human state is used until they connect Life and consent to contribute. Consent is given and withdrawn in the Life app. Leads and admins can't do it for anyone else. * **You see your own.** Your own numbers show in **My Effectiveness**. Your coding agent can also use your current state to change how it answers you, for example shorter, more focused replies when you're tired. Agents only get that coarse guidance, never health data. * **Teams see totals.** Team human-state views are medians over members who consented, and only above the cohort floor. Nobody can drill down to one person. * **It's never used to judge people.** Human state isn't used in alerts, goals, rankings or recommendations. An admin can turn team human-state views off for the whole organization. See [Team human-state views](https://docs.synheart.ai/synapse/team-views.md#team-human-state-views). ## The AI Effectiveness Index The **AI Effectiveness Index (AEI)** answers "how is AI working for us?" with **three separate measures, not one score**. Synapse never adds them up, weights them or ranks teams by them, because a single number would hide what's actually going on. | Part | The question | What it shows | | - | - | - | | **Adoption** | Are people using AI? | **Reach**, the share of measured members who used any AI tool, and **Habit**, the share of worked days with AI use. | | **Delivery** | Is work moving differently since AI arrived? | The change in median PR lead time in the 4 weeks after an AI tool's rollout, compared with the 4 weeks before. | | **Human** | How are people doing while they use it? | Team medians of focus, cognitive load and fatigue during work hours, with how many people consented. This part is in Beta. | The current version is **aei-v9**. Figures from aei-v8 or earlier were calculated differently, so don't compare them. For what's on each tab, see [AI Effectiveness](https://docs.synheart.ai/synapse/ai-effectiveness.md). ## The cohort floor The **cohort floor** is the smallest number of people a team human-state figure is shown for. Below it, the figure is withheld with a note, rather than estimated. It's **4 by default**, and an admin can raise it to as many as **50**. The floor is why a small team may see "Private" or a dash where a number would be. A team below the floor can still see its own view if every member [opts in to sharing](https://docs.synheart.ai/synapse/team-views.md#share-my-numbers-with-my-team). Work and delivery figures, such as merged PRs or AI adoption, describe your repositories and tools rather than people's state, so the floor doesn't hold them back. See [The cohort floor](https://docs.synheart.ai/synapse/team-views.md#the-cohort-floor) for every rule. ## Evidence labels Some numbers come with a label that says how strongly you can lean on them. * **Describe.** A plain count or share of what happened, like Reach. It says nothing about why. * **Associate.** A change that happened alongside AI use, like Delivery. It's a pattern worth looking into, not proof that AI caused it. * **Beta.** The measure is new and may change. Read it as a hint. Synapse also never shows a missing value as zero. A dash means there's no data. `0` means Synapse looked and found none. ## Where the data comes from | Source | Gives Synapse | Set up in | | - | - | - | | GitHub and GitLab | PRs, reviews, CI runs and deploys, for delivery metrics and AI attribution | **Connectors** | | AI tools (Copilot, Cursor, Claude, OpenAI) | Usage and spend reports | **Connectors** | | Notion, Google Drive, OneDrive, Slack, repositories | Organization knowledge for agents and search | **Knowledge sources** | | The Synheart CLI and MCP | Rule checks and agent calls, as day totals | [Developer setup](https://docs.synheart.ai/synapse/developer-setup.md) | | Life by Synheart | Human state, only for people who consent | **You → My connections** | For exactly what's stored and for how long, see [What Synapse collects](https://docs.synheart.ai/synapse/overview.md#what-synapse-collects). This documentation is built and hosted on [Mintlify](https://mintlify.com), a developer documentation platform.