Everyone is using Obsidian for AI, or wants to use it in order to get more productive. But I think it’s a dead end.

The reasons are clear: Obsidian notes are open on your local disk in an open format, Markdown, and accessible to everyone, including your AI agents. This makes it as great and easy an integration as possible. But should you actually use AI with your notes? And if so, what are the use cases or ways you should interact with it?

  1. First of all, if you use Vibe Code Agents with Obsidian, use the Obsidian CLI. It will be much faster in returning your files, searching, or doing an action than grepping through the files.
  2. I’m a strong proponent of not generating AI summaries[^1] or other on-the-fly generated text in my vault, and this is what I try to do as well. The reason is simple: over time, I don’t know anymore if the content was written by me or AI-generated, and my own, much more valuable thoughts get diminished by AI Slop.
  3. Also, when searching for something, you need to fight through the noise of generated stuff. If you only have your own writing, it’s all valuable, or at least there’s a reason why you noted it down. There was a conviction, idea, or something that moved you.
  4. Yes, it’s good in certain areas, and mostly on-the-spot summaries seem great, but every time I come back to them, I find them very average. It doesn’t help me, as it didn’t highlight the things I would, and I need to reread anyway.
  5. What I do sometimes with Obsidian Webclipper, if I create a new note, is summarize it in one sentence or a few. I clearly mark it as AI-generated and even put it into a quote, so it’s clear to me also in 5 years that it wasn’t mine. If I have added my own thoughts, I just remove it.
  6. Use it as search, like finding related notes. I think this might be the best use case. But don’t use it for tagging etc., because again, all of a sudden, all your relations and connections don’t count anything anymore, as they are not done by you. The power lies in the deliberately created graph of notes, your very own Second Brain.
  7. I don’t use it yet. I might when having a local model, as I have lots of sensitive notes that I don’t want to upload anywhere. Plus it takes away the thinking part of my My Obsidian Note-Taking Workflow. I don’t want to replace my human thinking yet. But I use a mathematical or local model with Obsidian Smart Connections, or the Graph Analysis plugin.

I’m pretty sure if you go all in using AI to generate and create your notes, you will end up with less clarity and fewer insights. You might start fresh very soon, as you won’t get value from it, and stop maintaining or adding ideas.

I think if you have an urge to do something, do it in a separate vault, or just use a database, e.g. DuckDB, and do all the fun stuff with AI. But don’t mix your precious notes and Zettelkasten for it. Not yet, at least, but probably never.

Example that Does not Scale, or Will Die Very soon

Automating the links and connections like this won’t sustain for YOUR second brain, for your ideas and notes - you are skipping the thinking, and IMO, the insights. Most of my ideas come from linking and seeing the links I made myself, sometimes years back.

A good example of what not to do for your own vault.
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For sure interesting to see what comes out, but I wouldn’t recomend it for your “second brain” where you develop your thinking and YOUR ideas.

If you want the above brain, which is not yours, you should use Wikipedia. Wikipedia graphs and wikilinks give you great insights, as the automated AI ones (probably more), but made by human collaborators. But if you want to create your own knowledge base, I’d do it manually. The payoff comes over the year, it compounds.

[^1] AI AI Summarization are just noise: “A summary of a PDF is noise. An insight I had from reading the PDF is signal”.
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## # Search is an Organizational Question

I have 25'979 files totaling 3.5 GB, all in a single vault, and I find everything in split seconds (using the Omnisearch plugin).

Search is pretty much an organizational question, e.g., I use Zettelkasten. Or if you need more advanced features, you can just add the Obsidian Smart Connections plugin and get vector and similarity search, etc., out of the box.

## # Your Notes Will Be Your Prompts Tomorrow

Remember, your notes will be prompts or libaries for AI tomorrow. But not if you generate them.

Kepano said in Agentic Skills:

If you started writing evergreen notes in 2022, those Markdown files are now software libraries
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## # Further Reads

Origin:
Li by mehdio, Obsidian
References: Writing is Thinking!,