Knowledge Management in the Age of AI
17 comments
·June 8, 2025agnishom
> Obsidian: An Org-Mode replacement?
I doubt it. Obsidian is not open source, and the core is maintained by a small group of people, rather than a community. What happens when the company dies?
That said, I am willing to have more faith in Obsidian, than many other things since they are not [VC funded](https://stephango.com/vcware)
aquariusDue
There's also something nice about having everything in the same place, at least until Obsidian becomes a code editor and email reader. For a while I thought that Neovim might be the next Emacs (if you squint a bit) but looks like Obsidian is halfway there if you take a look at the plugin landscape and what people are doing at the extreme ends.
Also stuff like Bases[0] might be the thing that entrenches Obsidian even further as an IDE for knowledge work (more or less).
jiri
With Obsidian, you have all your markdown files on your disk, so you can use vi or emacs to view and edit them while someone else put together replacement app ...
iansinnott
The author of that post also addresses this question in another: https://stephango.com/file-over-app
> The app will eventually become obsolete. It’s the plain text files I create that are designed to last.
raincole
Which is a bit of bummer, as I think they would be doing perfectly fine if they had open-sourced Obsidian's client and just sell sync service (as they are doing now anyway).
exceptione
With so many oss contenders in this space, it wouldn't surprise me if they eventually opensource it.
If not, someone might make an api-compatible oss clone, because lots of the value is in the myriad of plugins.
Obsidian's ace however is it's great wyiwyg text editor if you ask me, enabling friction-free writing.
trallnag
They also sell a business license. I wonder how much money they make with that compared to the sync service.
aquariusDue
I believe it's now free for commercial use.
jiri
I am also worried a bit about knowledge nowadays.
With LLM-based AI, should one also store individual chats in personal knowledge system? Yeah, I believe that some my chats are quite full of relevant info, that can be used in the future.
Also what is the right general approach here - should I ask the same question several times (every time I need information) or should I just look up previous answer in my history? To be fair I dont store google results, I just search it again, but with chat the path to right answer is often more complex than spitting few words in google search input box.
8s2ngy
> Emacs is a powerful tool, but it also demands a lot from its user. Eventually I got tired of dealing with the host of plugins and customizations that I needed to keep my system running the way I wanted. I'm at a point in my life where I would rather spend my spare time on hobbies, hanging out with family and friends, and otherwise not messing around with a patchwork of ELisp code snippets that I've cobbled together from various sources.
On the flip side, my experience with Emacs has been quite different. You don't need a ton of plugins to get the most out of it; I've been using the same configuration of under 200 lines for the past six years without encountering any breaking changes. I rely on Magit, Org-mode, Org-roam, and Org-agenda every single day.
That said, using Emacs does require some commitment to reading the documentation. While I agree that it has some outdated defaults, you only need to make those adjustments once.
minikomi
Denote with a gptel-make-tool that's able to pull relevant notes and bring it automatically into context is fantastic.
aquariusDue
Semi related there's also ekg which stores notes in a sqlite database and uses tags as titles as in you don't really have to name a note per se and multiple notes can share a "title" which is just a tag.
But that's not why I mentioned ekg, the reason is that it does embedding out of the box, here's a quote from the repo on GitHub:
"There is support for attaching Large Language Model (LLM) “embeddings” to notes, for use in search and similarity search, via the llm package. This allows you to search based on semantics, as opposed to text matching. You can also use LLM chat in your notes, getting an LLM to respond to your notes based on a default prompt, or new prompts that you add."
These days I feel like you have lots of great options for note-taking in Emacs and you're not forced to use the org format unless you want to.
ekg repo: https://github.com/ahyatt/ekg
kreyenborgi
I use gptel in emacs, and keep around some of the chats and such as notes, along with my regular notes, it's all org-mode. I already used to keep around snippets copy-pasted from the web. This is knowledge management in the age of AI (except it works, it's useful and mundane and so I guess it's no longer AI, maybe I have to start using MCP agents or whatever the next partially-there thing is to be AI)
bachmeier
> Task-tracking and note-taking are practical and useful, but ultimately I want to treat my own thoughts as if they have value. I want to be a little more intentional and deliberate in my own thinking, and to have a space to engage in dialog with my own ideas. I want to be able to draw from my own knowledge instead of relying on AI assistants for everything. Maybe such an approach can even be complimentary to using AI tools; with the right plugins Obsidian can serve as an MCP server, which would allow tools like Claude to discover and read items in your vault. Perhaps this could offer the best of both worlds. But the key thing is that the AI is the assistant, and my thoughts and ideas remain my own.
Maybe I'm missing the author's point, as it's early here, but I don't see how your own thoughts can possibly lack value because of AI. LLMs can only summarize the documents it was trained on, so it has no way to tell you what you're thinking (like why something is wrong). The value of AI is using RAG or semantic search to make your notes more useful to you. What the author's suggesting is outside the capabilities of current LLMs. By design, AI can only be used as an assistant.
sorokod
The OP linked "You'll Never Think Alone"[1] is a good read.
[1] https://publiccomment.blog/p/you-ll-never-think-alone-170518...
crashabr
[dead]
I looked into Obsidian a few years ago but decided against it due to the lack of encryption and self-hosting options. Are there now any workarounds or solutions available that provide encryption and self-hosting capabilities?