Knowledge Management in the Age of AI

The Joy (and pain) of Emacs ​

I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor.
—Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning was the Command Line

Some years ago, 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. "Emacs is a great operating system that only lacks a decent text editor", as the old joke goes. This rang fairly true in my own experience. Emacs is ostensibly a text editor, but really it is a gateway to a whole world of text-based, flexible tools for managing data of various kinds. Tools like Magit and Org-mode offered (and still offer) unique ways to make sense of a codebase, track tasks, manage notes, automate and integrate with other systems, etc. This was "personal computing" at its purest; most modern GUI productivity apps felt like toys in comparison.

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.

However, I often found myself missing some of the features that Emacs provided – Org-Mode in particular. Org-Mode is a tool for writing hierarchical text documents, and can serve as the foundation for an entirely text-based workflow for note-taking, agendas, and various forms of personal knowledge management. Once you get the hang of it, it's very intuitive. Some people manage their entire lives through Org-Mode and use it to have years of information at their fingertips.

Obsidian: An Org-Mode replacement? ​

I'm currently in the process of preparing for a new role on a new team at my job, and I have a lot of projects to get up to speed on. Enter Obsidian: a markdown-based text editor and note-taking app that has a lot of features useful for "personal knowledge management". Obsidian is proprietary software, but like Emacs it has an extensive system of community-provided plugins that support all kinds of different workflows (currently I'm using the Tasks and Dataview plugins, both of which let you dynamically aggregate different kinds of content from across documents in one place). Unlike Emacs, out-of-the-box usage of Obsidian is very straightforward (there's even a good Vim mode!), and there is a well-designed iOS client as well (the lack of an easy way to see tasks on a mobile device was one of the biggest limitations of Org-Mode in my experience).

Like Emacs, Obsidian can be used in a lot of different ways. If I'm going to be successful with this tool, I need to have a vision for how I want to use it. I did a little bit of research about frameworks for personal knowledge management and came across the PARA method. The basic idea behind PARA is that you file all your various notes or documents into 4 distinct folders: Projects (actionable, short-term), Areas (long-term responsibilities or recurring work), Resources (useful info to reference later), and Archive (anything from any other category that is no longer active). Uncategorized notes typically go into a dedicated inbox folder, and then get organized during a weekly review session. The system seems pretty simple, which I hope will help with being consistent over time. I'd rather have a simple system that I can consistently apply as opposed to a complicated one that I give up on after a few months. PARA is software-independent but it's easy to implement in Obsidian – a "vault" in Obsidian is just a collection of folders and files. My top-level vault structure looks like this:

In addition to the PARA folders (which are numbered to keep them in the desired order) I have an Inbox, an "attachments" directory (Obsidian will put any attached files there automatically, keeping the rest of the structure uncluttered), a "templates" directory for re-usable content, and a small number of top-level files – a dashboard that pulls together items from various places (using the Dataview plugin), a master todo list (which pulls in tasks from all documents and organizes them, using the Tasks plugin), and a README file to remind me how things are structured. Everything else lives on one of these folders – typically the Inbox first, and then one of the PARA folders after review.

We'll see how well this works in practice, but this is my plan for now.

Why bother doing this? ​

I mentioned above that I stopped using Emacs because I no longer wished to spend the time or effort in fine-tuning and maintaining the custom workflows I was relying on. Setting up a personally-curated system (complete with its own acronym) to manage notes, bookmarks, tasks, etc. sounds like a lot of similar fiddly computer work. So why bother doing it?

The rise of LLM-based AIs like ChatGPT amounts to a paradigm-shift in human-computer interaction. If Steve Jobs was building bicycles for the mind, then Sam Altman is operating a fleet of automated driverless taxis like the ones you can currently see cruising the streets of San Francisco. These tools offer a lot of convenience, but you are increasingly a passenger being taken along for a ride.

I'm not a complete AI doomer (not yet at least), but I worry about how much people may start to outsource their own thinking to these tools. I worry about succumbing to the convenience myself if I'm being honest.

So what is the value of maintaining a personal knowledge base in the age of AI? 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.

At the end of the day, I still want to ride my own damn bicycle.