I’ve been building this since 2022. It’s where everything goes - notes, projects, finances, a media library, journals. Fully private, nothing to link to. But it’s the thing I’ve spent the most time on, so it’s here.
Moved away from Notion because I wanted to actually own my files. Plain markdown, stored locally, nothing on anyone else’s server.
Obsidian’s just the storage layer now. An AI coding assistant sits on top of it and does most of the day-to-day work, routed through a root file that points every conversation at the right reference doc depending on what’s being discussed- finances, academics, a car I’m restoring, freelance work- and none of those load unless the conversation touches them. Keeps things fast, and keeps context from one part of my life bleeding into another.
The habit the whole system is built around is capture. Whenever something worth remembering comes up mid-conversation, a decision, a new fact, a project update, it gets written to the right file immediately, not saved for later. Later never happens. There’s a note-writing pipeline too- paste in a rough transcript or a stream-of-consciousness voice memo, and it comes back as a clean, properly tagged note in my own voice instead of a generic summary. That took a long time to tune, and it’s still not perfect.
The one place fully off-limits, even to the assistant when I ask it to search the vault, is my own journal.