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Obsidian-Copilot: A Prototype Assistant for Writing and Thinking

eugeneyan.com

41–50 of 72 posts

Re: Obsidian-Copilot: A Prototype Assistant for Writing and Thinking

#41
> We start by parsing documents into chunks. A sensible default is to chunk documents by token length, typically 1,500 to 3,000 tokens per chunk. However, I found that this didn’t work very well. A better approach might be to chunk by paragraphs (e.g., split on \n\n).

Hmm good insight there. I've done some experimenting formerly by chunk length and it's been pretty troublesome due to missing context.

Re: Obsidian-Copilot: A Prototype Assistant for Writing and Thinking

#42

I use vim with the Copilot plugin. It's pretty astounding what it spits out. I was writing a handbook for a credit union board of directors and it was quite helpful at times.

I thought copilot only works for code. How did you use it to write a handbook?

Copilot is designed for code, but it can still be used for whatever you want. I found it useful when writing latex files, even for the text explanation portions as opposed to the text markup 'code'. There was a y combinator thread on this earlier.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29920035

Re: Obsidian-Copilot: A Prototype Assistant for Writing and Thinking

#43
post #41

> We start by parsing documents into chunks. A sensible default is to chunk documents by token length, typically 1,500 to 3,000 tokens per chunk. However, I found that this didn’t work very well. A better approach might be to chunk by paragraphs (e.g., split on \n\n). Hmm good insight there. I've done some experimenting formerly by chunk length and it's been pretty troublesome due to missing context.

The unstructured package works well to partition text, markdown, html, even pdf on structural boundaries like paragraphs, h, hr etc

https://unstructured-io.github.io/unstructured/bricks.html#p...

Re: Obsidian-Copilot: A Prototype Assistant for Writing and Thinking

#44

Another option is to use llama-index and index the Obsidian vault. I use a gradio based web interface to query my Obsidian vault via GPT-3.5. It's pretty awesome.

Do you have code for this (or pointers to what you used to set this up)? I'd love to set up something similar!

This: https://github.com/hwchase17/chroma-langchain/blob/master/pe...

I turned that into cli tool, but it isn't ready to release. Mine works like this:

    qwoo index .
    qwoo qa "What have I been up to?"

Re: Obsidian-Copilot: A Prototype Assistant for Writing and Thinking

#45
post #41

> We start by parsing documents into chunks. A sensible default is to chunk documents by token length, typically 1,500 to 3,000 tokens per chunk. However, I found that this didn’t work very well. A better approach might be to chunk by paragraphs (e.g., split on \n\n). Hmm good insight there. I've done some experimenting formerly by chunk length and it's been pretty troublesome due to missing context.

You don't do a sliding window? That seems like the logical way to maintain context but allow look up by 'chunks'. Embed it, say, 3 paragraphs at a time, advancing 1 paragraph per embedding.

Re: Obsidian-Copilot: A Prototype Assistant for Writing and Thinking

#47
post #45
post #41

> We start by parsing documents into chunks. A sensible default is to chunk documents by token length, typically 1,500 to 3,000 tokens per chunk. However, I found that this didn’t work very well. A better approach might be to chunk by paragraphs (e.g., split on \n\n). Hmm good insight there. I've done some experimenting formerly by chunk length and it's been pretty troublesome due to missing context.

You don't do a sliding window? That seems like the logical way to maintain context but allow look up by 'chunks'. Embed it, say, 3 paragraphs at a time, advancing 1 paragraph per embedding.

I've thought about doing this as well, but I haven't tried it yet. Are there any resources/blogs/information on various strategies on how to best chunk & embed arbitrary text?

Re: Obsidian-Copilot: A Prototype Assistant for Writing and Thinking

#48

I use vim with the Copilot plugin. It's pretty astounding what it spits out. I was writing a handbook for a credit union board of directors and it was quite helpful at times.

This is a great idea. I'll have to try opening my obsidian vault with the new copilot chat.

Re: Obsidian-Copilot: A Prototype Assistant for Writing and Thinking

#49
post #36

This looks great! I was about to start learning and diving into Obsidian about a month ago, finally driven to begin building a personal knowledgebase... And then I found Mem.ai and dove into that instead, and i've been extremely happy with it. It accomplishes this aspect he's offering here (where it uses your knowledgebase to assist in your writing). However, it's also got built in chat with your knowledgebase, and h…

How does notion compare?

I haven't used Notion, but in my research its AI feature is only the Smart Write/Edit that Mem has - tho I am unsure how well it uses the rest of the content you have inside of Notion, as their sales page doesn't really make that clear.

Mem.ai has integrated many aspects into it - I love that I am now unconcerned about tags or folders or categories.

Re: Obsidian-Copilot: A Prototype Assistant for Writing and Thinking

#50

I use vim with the Copilot plugin. It's pretty astounding what it spits out. I was writing a handbook for a credit union board of directors and it was quite helpful at times.

I thought copilot only works for code. How did you use it to write a handbook?

1. Install vim Copilot plugin. 2. Name your file with .txt extension. 3. Write stuff.

https://github.com/github/copilot.vim

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