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 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.
   1. 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.
   2. 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.
   3. 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.
3. 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.
   1. 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.

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