bulaev.ai

Obsidian

Freemium

Other · Personal & corporate AI OS

A local Markdown vault for your notes; the knowledge base an agent can read with plain file tools.

Open obsidian.md

What it is

Obsidian is a note-taking app that stores everything as plain Markdown files in a folder on your device. Links between notes, backlinks, a graph view, daily notes, canvas boards and a search that works offline come built in, and thousands of community plugins add task tracking, Kanban, calendar views and database-style queries over your notes (Dataview, Tasks, Kanban and Calendar are the ones the site features). The site's line is "the free and flexible app for your private thoughts", and the core app is free without limits. Paid add-ons are Sync (end-to-end encrypted sync with version history) and Publish (turn a folder into a public site).

The property that matters for an AI operating system is the file format. A vault is a directory of .md files, so Claude Code, a shell script or a cron job can read and write it with no API, and you are never locked in.

Where it fits in the AI OS

Personal & corporate AI OS, the memory layer. Meeting notes, decisions, people, half-formed ideas: if they live as Markdown in one folder, every agent you run can be pointed at that folder as context. The same structure scales to a company handbook in a git repository.

Insider notes

members

How Serge's stack uses it

The membership project keeps its own knowledge as Markdown in the repository (spec, decision log, ideas cards with frontmatter), which is the same model an Obsidian vault uses; whether Serge edits that in Obsidian or another editor is not documented.

[SERGE: fill in]

Setup in 5 minutes

  1. Install, create a vault in a folder you already back up (or a git repository).
  2. Turn on Daily Notes and set a template with three headings: Did, Decided, Next.
  3. Install Dataview and add one query to a "Decisions" note that lists every note tagged #decision.
  4. Open a terminal in the vault folder and run Claude Code: "summarize this week's daily notes into a Monday plan".
  5. Decide on Sync, iCloud or git for other devices; do not run two of them.

Alternatives

  • Notion — hosted, collaborative, databases first; not local files.
  • Logseq — outliner-style, open-source, also Markdown.
  • Apple Notes / Google Keep — quick capture, no structure, no files.
  • A plain folder of Markdown plus VS Code — what Obsidian is underneath, without the graph and plugins.