Plain markdown files turned out to be the best possible interface between a decade of notes and a language model. No API, no export, no connector, no sync service in the middle: the agent opens the folder and reads it, the same way I do. This post is what happened once I let it.
The setup # There is a CLAUDE.md file at the root of my vault. It is twenty-nine lines long, and the last three of them say this:
The pitch I once wrote for a conference talk still says it best: Obsidian has a cult following “not because it’s clever software, but because of what it isn’t: your notes are just plain markdown files in a folder on your computer. No database, no cloud lock-in, no proprietary format. Just files.”
Nothing ages as well as plain text; it has been the same since, well, files were invented. Markdown is just a very thin layer that gives the plain text some structure, and allows it to be rendered and displayed in an aesthetically pleasing way.
I have always taken notes. At first on paper - there are still many handwritten notebooks somewhere in the archives - but for the last thirty years or so most of them, if not all, have been digital. And digital always means an application and a format. I have tried a lot of them.
While doing so I made pretty much every mistake one can make when it comes to choosing an application and settling on a workflow. What follows is a tour of the graveyard: a long line of tools, most of them now dead, and the lesson each one charged me on the way out.