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 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”.

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. 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.

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. 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.