Knowledge Management in the Age of AI

> 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 While I agree that it has some outdated defaults, you only need to make those adjustments once.

> 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)

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).

They also sell a business license. I wonder how much money they make with that compared to the sync service.

> 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.