Knowledge Management in the Age of AI

https://ericgardner.info/notes/knowledge-management-june-2025

by katabasis • 1 year ago

131 89 1 year ago

8s2ngy• 1 year ago

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 While I agree that it has some outdated defaults, you only need to make those adjustments once.

Beijinger• 1 year ago

Emacs is an incredible, powerful tool. It just lacks a decent editor.

spit2wind• 1 year ago

I second this. Emacs is plenty capable out of the box and just fine that way. It's a "choose your own adventure" that allows you to be as disciplined or as reckless as you choose. It's almost like it grants you...freedom :)

I think this SO question demonstrates this well. The question is how to select a window quickly. You can install umpteen different packages and have several black-box soltions, if you want. But it really can be as simple as this if it fits your need:

``` ;; Select the 3rd window in the `window-list' (select-window (nth 2 (window-list))) ```

Emacs almost always allows you to find a solution in-between.

https://emacs.stackexchange.com/a/79692

sorokod• 1 year ago

The OP linked "You'll Never Think Alone"[1] is a good read.

[1] https://publiccomment.blog/p/you-ll-never-think-alone-170518...

jplusequalt2• 1 year ago

Great article, but I think this article will get a look of flak from the people who frequent HN.

I_complete_me• 1 year ago

Interesting the link was dead when I tried it. Then when I googled "You'll never think again" all I got was "You'll never walk alone". I thought: "I'll never search again".

agnishom• 1 year ago

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)

raincole• 1 year ago

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).

trallnag2• 1 year ago

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

exceptione• 1 year ago

With so many oss contenders in this space, it wouldn't surprise me if they eventually opensource it.

If not, someone might make an api-compatible oss clone, because lots of the value is in the myriad of plugins.

Obsidian's ace however is it's great wyiwyg text editor if you ask me, enabling friction-free writing.

iansinnott• 1 year ago

The author of that post also addresses this question in another: https://stephango.com/file-over-app

The app will eventually become obsolete. It’s the plain text files I create that are designed to last.

jiri2• 1 year ago

With Obsidian, you have all your markdown files on your disk, so you can use vi or emacs to view and edit them while someone else put together replacement app ...

aquariusDue4• 1 year ago

There's also something nice about having everything in the same place, at least until Obsidian becomes a code editor and email reader. For a while I thought that Neovim might be the next Emacs (if you squint a bit) but looks like Obsidian is halfway there if you take a look at the plugin landscape and what people are doing at the extreme ends.

Also stuff like Bases[0] might be the thing that entrenches Obsidian even further as an IDE for knowledge work (more or less).

[0] https://help.obsidian.md/bases

greymalik• 1 year ago

It doesn’t matter if Obsidian dies. The files are standard markdown you control and there is no lock-in. You can simply move on to another tool.

layer83• 1 year ago

You seem to be saying that the tool doesn’t matter. However, people who use Obsidian typically use it for a reason (other than the file format) over other tools.

al_borland4• 1 year ago

This depends how deep down the rabbit hole someone goes. At a basic level, yes, this is true. However, if someone has built a complex system around properties, data views, and various other plugins, they're going to have a hard time.

There is a lot to be said for the value of simplicity, if one of the goals is portability.

oth001• 1 year ago

Joplin?

jocoda• 1 year ago

The big win is using standard markdown. If they disappear, you still have your content.

The other big win is it's truly cross platform. I initially used syncthing to keep different systems in sync but switched to their sync service. Syncthing works fine but I found adding a new system and integrating was cumbersome if you haven't done it recently. With Obsidian's sync service setting up a new system was trivial.

Shortcoming - printing. Need to generate a pdf and use it's print feature. Another shortcoming is merging a hierarchy of folders and notes into a composite document.

kreyenborgi• 1 year ago

I use gptel in emacs, and keep around some of the chats and such as notes, along with my regular notes, it's all org-mode. I already used to keep around snippets copy-pasted from the web. This is knowledge management in the age of AI (except it works, it's useful and mundane and so I guess it's no longer AI, maybe I have to start using MCP agents or whatever the next partially-there thing is to be AI)

bachmeier• 1 year ago

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.

crashabr• 1 year ago

Crazy coincidence as I just started setting up my PARA system on Logseq.

ta988• 1 year ago

Yeah PARA is the new hype in knowledge management, those come and go (Zettelkasten, atomic notes...) I don't find PARA particularly useful. Using links and tags with no directories at all work much better for me. But I think that's the nice thing (and also the curse) of all of those you can spend your time biie shedding with the different versions of yourself in time instead of using it for your life.

leakycap4• 1 year ago

Took me a minute to understand you meant bike-shedding, which was an interesting rabbit hole - thanks for your typo!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality

al_borland4• 1 year ago

I couldn't wrap my head around PARA. The waters were too muddy between projects, areas, and resources.

Take travel for example. I have travel resources (packing lists, loyalty reward numbers, etc). I would presumably have a travel area, as it's something I'd like to be a semi-major part of my life long-term. But I'd also think whatever trips I'm currently planning are "projects". Does this mean 3 travel folders, in 3 different parents, so I have to go 3 places for one topic?

It all seemed so confusing.

leakycap4• 1 year ago

I look at these systems like I look at templates or Lego instructions... here's what you can do! Now go do you.

GTD from the days of Palm PDAs still works fantastically if you just use it.

The key is just to choose a system that seems like it will work for you based on the published "way to use" it ... and then make it your own and stop looking.

You basically need a monogamous relationship with blinders on so you can actually become a deep expert in your own productivity tool and be able to rely on it and refer to it without thinking.

minikomi• 1 year ago

Denote with a gptel-make-tool that's able to pull relevant notes and bring it automatically into context is fantastic.

aquariusDue4• 1 year ago

Semi related there's also ekg which stores notes in a sqlite database and uses tags as titles as in you don't really have to name a note per se and multiple notes can share a "title" which is just a tag.

But that's not why I mentioned ekg, the reason is that it does embedding out of the box, here's a quote from the repo on GitHub:

"There is support for attaching Large Language Model (LLM) “embeddings” to notes, for use in search and similarity search, via the llm package. This allows you to search based on semantics, as opposed to text matching. You can also use LLM chat in your notes, getting an LLM to respond to your notes based on a default prompt, or new prompts that you add."

These days I feel like you have lots of great options for note-taking in Emacs and you're not forced to use the org format unless you want to.

ekg repo: https://github.com/ahyatt/ekg

jiri2• 1 year ago

I am also worried a bit about knowledge nowadays.

With LLM-based AI, should one also store individual chats in personal knowledge system? Yeah, I believe that some my chats are quite full of relevant info, that can be used in the future.

Also what is the right general approach here - should I ask the same question several times (every time I need information) or should I just look up previous answer in my history? To be fair I dont store google results, I just search it again, but with chat the path to right answer is often more complex than spitting few words in google search input box.

chrisweekly• 1 year ago

slight tangent: google's search results are abysmal, strong recommendation to try kagi instead.

exiguus5• 1 year ago

I looked into Obsidian a few years ago but decided against it due to the lack of encryption and self-hosting options. Are there now any workarounds or solutions available that provide encryption and self-hosting capabilities?

bram85• 1 year ago

https://standardnotes.com/

They have a dedicated page that compares with Obsidian here:

https://standardnotes.com/compare/obsidian-alternative

wim• 1 year ago

We’re working on a new IDE but for tasks/notes [1] which is end-to-end-encrypted and optionally self-hostable

[1] https://thymer.com

gdulli• 1 year ago

https://notesnook.com/

al_borland4• 1 year ago

Not sure on encryption, but the notes themselves are just files and folders, you can host and sync the files with anything you want. Unless you're talking about wanting it as a self-hosted web app?

exiguus5• 1 year ago

My primary concern is the lack of encryption for the notes. This absence of encryption leaves them exposed and vulnerable. Relying on third-party services like Dropbox, iCloud, or similar platforms to sync notes across devices only heightens the potential for data exposure. There is also a Obsidian forum thread about that [1].

I believe the primary issue with nearly all note-taking tools is the lack of genuine encryption. Many claim to use end-to-end encryption, but I find this misleading. End-to-end encryption secures communication, not the data itself.

I wouldn't recommend a tool to anyone that doesn't encrypt the data itself to maintain private notes. Its like storing your passwords in plain text.

[1] https://forum.obsidian.md/t/local-file-encryption-of-obsidia...

ebiester• 1 year ago

AI isn’t quite good enough for organizing your notes yet. However, the biggest issue with our notes is that we make them for us, not another person, so the context is lacking for search.

leakycap4• 1 year ago

I recently searched "starbuck" in Apple Notes and it didn't find the note because the phrase in the note was actually "Starbuck's"

I add plaintext keywords to the notes I write myself, but sometimes the note app is truly the problem when search implementation/tokenization doesn't make sense.

cratermoon• 1 year ago

The author doesn't mention what I consider the true value of writing and organizing your notes yourself: that work is the work that drives learning and understanding.

I experimented with feeding my notes into an LLM model for RAG and was underwhelmed. The resulting output was repetitive, stilted, dry, and uninspiring. I wanted it to see if it find relationships between my ideas that I had not found on my own, but was disappointed . It did not provide me any new insights into my thinking. The style of what it did write was so foreign to my own style I found myself needing to read and re-interpret what it wrote back into my own ways of thinking that it was more busywork than help.

treetalker2• 1 year ago

Yes. People seem to be forgetting that, in many contexts, the greater part (or at least a major part) of work's desired outcome is to make changes to the conscious and subconscious minds that enable them to better handle future situations.

I'm all about automated solutions for things — but I find that my desires are typically for unrewarding physical activities. I still don't have a virtually costless robot butler, driver, farmer, chef, and maid to anticipate my needs around the house and home office; to transport my family and me around town safely and on time; to grow microplastic-free food hydroponically; to do my meal planning, shopping, cooking, cleaning, tidying, and laundry with effectively no intervention and supervision on my part. Why not?

Now that would really 10x my productivity.

awinter-py3• 1 year ago

why the H does this have the same opening line as moby dick

why are emacs users like this

dpassens• 1 year ago

I'm not seeing any "Call me Ishmael".

awinter-py3• 1 year ago

some years ago

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world

cjauvin• 1 year ago

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. I gradually stopped using Emacs in favor of more modern tools that are less flexible but also less of a hassle.

I don't know how many times I've read a variation on this. It took me a very long time, but now I pretty much made my peace with that: I use Emacs (for certain things), I use VS Code (with Emacs bindings), I use Apple Notes.. I don't find that it's possible or reasonable anymore, the desire to be "pure" and use only ONE tool to rule them all. The same for messaging apps, chatbots, etc.. I now embrace extreme diversity.

nextos3• 1 year ago

Eventually I got tired of dealing with the host of plugins and customizations

The trick is to stick to as few packages and as little configuration as possible. And when opting to install a package, sticking to something popular and well maintained. This leads to a small and robust setup with little churn. Most built-in packages work out of the box. Most defaults make a lot of sense. Emacs is really tidy these days compared to where it was one decade ago. Package management has been key facilitating this.

Personally, I use major packages like AUCTeX, Org, Magit, or gptel with little to no customization and I avoid installing lesser known packages that build on top of them as I have found this to be a major source of fragility. You can get a lot of functionality from a boring 50 LOC .emacs/init.el that consists of a few straightforward use-package directives.

coltoneakins• 1 year ago

This makes me feel seen. I was a lunatic at one point trying to make Emacs to be my end-all-be-all. I learned to cope with multiple programs being my "toolset" since then.

edanm3• 1 year ago

I don't find that it's possible or reasonable anymore, the desire to be "pure" and use only ONE tool to rule them all.

It's not about being "pure". I was originally interested in Emacs because of the idea of only ever having to learn to use one tool, that would give me a better experience in many different domains.

Since, as you say, that doesn't really work, I personally don't find using Emacs compelling anymore, hence my not using it. (I actually used vim for a long time, then Emacs briefly, and now VSCode/Cursor/other things as the need arises.)

nextos3• 1 year ago

In what ways do you find VSCode or Cursor superior or more convenient to Emacs?

bob1029• 1 year ago

I've been using pen & paper lately.

The context switch between digital and analog is compelling. There is something satisfying about throwing a piece of physical paper away after pushing your commits.

I tend to hoard information, so having a medium that is highly constrained keeps me honest with what I hold onto over time. Not being able to do full text search over my notes means I prefer to keep no more than ~one legal pad active at any given time.

I also tend to get distracted with shiny technology tools. I can take my notes anywhere. I don't need an internet connection. I can fold the piece of paper and store it in my wallet.

treetalker2• 1 year ago

Lindy effect. I'm in the same boat, albeit in the legal realm.

saulpw• 1 year ago

Yup. I use 3x5 notecards. I like their "heft" and the fact that I can't lose a physical card like I lose digital content.

dotancohen2• 1 year ago

I must be old. I remember the naive days of thinking that once something is on a hard drive, it can't be lost like something in your pocket.

I think I got over that sometime while Clinton was in office ))

UltraSane• 1 year ago

Not being able to instantly search notes drastically reduces their utility.

leakycap4• 1 year ago

Knowledge is as much about familiarity as anything else

I started my personal knowledge base in the days of Mac OS 8 and still use it. Classic Mac OS with it's spacial finder and 1-to-1 file and window mapping works so well for my brain I still use it today for things I want to save and refer to.

I use & subscribe to AIs, but my personal knowledge is kept in the system I can use like the back of my hand, which happened to be the Macintosh Finder for me.

briian• 1 year ago

I think the key to ensuring you don't lose your own ability to think is to just delay the onset of using AI when solving a problem.

The more deeply you think, you train your brain harder, but also improve the utility of the AI systems themselves because you can prompt better.

joshuajooste05• 1 year ago

I constantly find myself just jumping to AI whenever I have a question. It is actually scaring me how much I just rely on it.

CuriouslyC• 1 year ago

There is value in trying to figure things out on your own, but even then if you can resist the temptation to let the machine think for you, I think AI is still useful for clarifying the problem and working through pros and cons of your ideas to solve it.

resize2996• 1 year ago

Of course, but there comes a point when doing long division by hand no longer adds to my understanding.

bsenftner• 1 year ago

Every article that begins with any variation of loses me immediately:

"I went through a phase that I imagine many software developers go through at least once in their careers—a period of intense fascination with Emacs..."

What is this widespread overt fascination with the tools one use? I've always been aware of a tradeoff between why one uses a tool and any tendency to fascinate on the tool or process of using a tool. The use, the purpose, the goal outside and originally to want any tool has always been my preference. To see the forest when among trees, to see a purpose and path through. Not to navel gaze at the existence of tools in preference to using them beyond pontificating their existence. This then extends to shaking my head at the swelled population of developer influencers that over fascinate on tools, appearing to do that in preference of anything else.

This confuses a tool with knowledge itself. smh.

zackify• 1 year ago

This is why I made revect. I even have an obsidian plugin in progress.

The goal to index your obsidian and also persist anything from llm chats, and browsing history.

To your own sqlite database so you can still own your data across providers.

I’m sure someone with much more time than me will win with a better version of it

https://github.com/zackify/revect

thorum3• 1 year ago

If you're interested in preserving your ability to think for yourself in the age of AI, I recommend Henrik Karlsson's blog Escaping Flatland. While not directly about AI, his articles "Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born" [1] and "Childhoods of exceptional people" [2] explore similar themes of how to train your mind to have original ideas and learn to solve problems on your own.

[1] https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/good-ideas

[2] https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/childhoods

https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/archive?sort=top

absurdo2• 1 year ago

Unfortunately a lot of this kind of writing teeter-totters between being a massive coping strategy or a circlejerk. Using the lives of exceptional people as a blueprint for the everyday person is ridiculous. I’m reminded of people following professional bodybuilding schedules and meal plans to lose a bit of weight, getting caught up in nonsense like “cheat meals” and “cheat days.” Likewise, if you don’t have any exceptional abilities such that your creativity will advance a field forward, you may want to be reasonable with your expectations and outcomes of what you actually can apply your time and energy to.

At least read Gatto’s work in education because he knows what he’s talking about as an actual teacher who has put more students through schooling than anyone writing these articles. His work contradicts some of this because he studied very non-exceptional childhoods of exceptional people. He has a better answer to how to think for oneself as well.

To actually get to the bottom of things: I think most normal folks are concerned more about getting by and making decent money in “the age of AI” than they are about being brilliant whizkid prodigies coming up with original ideas. A lot of those end up being poor anyway. But the desire to live a quality life is a more universal thing. No amount of “mind training” will help here. Just steer clear of paths that AI can dominate (they’re expanding), and failing that, use it to your advantage as best as you can.

Right now working with one’s hands seems to be in vogue because it’s one of those things that people are unaware of is actually dominated by robotics in the industrial/manufacturing sectors, so the ignorance there can probably get people through some hard times. But eventually even that will be shown for what it is and we’ll have to find better ways to spend our time.

jplusequalt2• 1 year ago

Right now working with one’s hands seems to be in vogue

Working with one's hands has been in vogue since the dawn of human history.

thorum3• 1 year ago

To actually get to the bottom of things: I think most normal folks are concerned more about getting by and making decent money in “the age of AI” than they are about being brilliant whizkid prodigies coming up with original ideas. A lot of those end up being poor anyway. But the desire to live a quality life is a more universal thing. No amount of “mind training” will help here. Just steer clear of paths that AI can dominate (they’re expanding), and failing that, use it to your advantage as best as you can.

In my experience most people working on this are attempting variations on a handful of generic ideas. Most AI startups are fairly uninspired “XYZ but with AI chat” type things or ideas that have no staying power because Claude 7 will one-shot the whole product with a prompt. Succeeding here in the long run means doing something truly different and new and interesting and that’s what the linked articles are about.

sph• 1 year ago

Thanks for the links, but just a note. The thesis of being alone is not enough to be creative in this day and age. As advice, it worked quite well before the advent of modern technology, so the oft-quoted works on solitude from Nietzsche, Jung, etc. just don’t mention a state of being that was quite commonplace at the time, but has practically disappeared: the long hours of contemplation, which for the modern philosopher Byung-Chul Han are the crucial component of creativity; it can only express itself when we’re steeped in boredom and non-activity for a long enough time. We have completely eliminated it in the past 100 years with radio, TV and now by staring at our screens all day, to work, and to “relax.” We do not contemplate the world anymore, we do not let ourselves be spontaneously creative.

I recommend Byung-Chul Han’s books The Burnout Society and Vita contemplativa: In praise of inactivity for a short but deep dive into this aspect we’re rapidly losing.

(I have just finished reading both books and I quite enjoyed the main thesis, though thick with philosophical discourse at times. Thankfully, they are quite short, not even reaching 100 pages so they don’t overstay their welcome)

thorum3• 1 year ago

Thanks for the recommendations and I agree completely.

There's some hope, we can get better at this even in small ways by carving out pockets of time away from phones and notifications and other external distractions and inputs.

Knowledge Management in the Age of AI

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