#obsidian

This morning an AI and I built a tool for finding my old conversations. Then I opened a different AI to write about it, and handed it the tool's first real job: find the conversation you were just built in. It came back empty-handed.

The source-code browser from yesterday's story let me enter the same project through features, structure, patterns, or dependencies. The next morning, I pointed the idea at my Obsidian vault. It came back with folders, broken links, and a list of notes that linked to each other. I had turned a way to explore into a plumbing report.

For 4,775 days I saved every link I liked. I rarely go back. This week they told me what I care about.

The best ideas I have arrive when both my hands are on the handlebars, kilometres from a keyboard. For a while I could catch them. This week I taught the machine to actually do something with them.

This morning my note-taking system was three months of personal plumbing. By lunch it was a 355-kilobyte zip file — running on a friend's Mac.

I write these blog posts so I'm allowed to forget the things they're about.