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It's so hard to finish an idea that is not yours (and suggested by AI)
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Aug 26, 2026
by Simon Späti · CreatedCreated: Apr 24, 2026 · 8 min read
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published · 1792 words
Everyone is using Obsidian for AI, or wants to use it to become 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?
First of all, if you use Vibe Code Agents with Obsidian, use the Obsidian CLI. It will be much faster to return your files, search, or act, grepping through the files.
Second, I’m a strong proponent of avoiding adding lots of AI-generated summaries[^1] or other on-the-fly-generated text to my vault. The reason is simple: over time, I don’t know anymore whether the content was written by me or by an AI, and my own, much more valuable thoughts get diminished by “AI Slop”.
But, use it for advanced research, like finding related notes. I think this might be the best use case. But don’t use it for tagging or organization, because eventually all your relations and connections won’t count for anything, since they aren’t made by you. The power lies in the deliberately created graph of notes, your very own Second Brain.
My Obsidian Vault with Smart Lookup and related notes with Smart Connections and local graph | Also check out Vim Motions for Writers to see my writing workflow and how I write
I personally don’t use it like that yet, but I might one day with a powerful local model, since I have lots of sensitive notes I don’t want to upload anywhere. Plus, it takes away the thinking part of
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 that if you go all in with using AI to generate 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.
[^1] To be clear, I mean long summaries, no harm in a 1-2 sentence intro in a note.