I just can't bring myself to go to the effort of documenting a thought and adding links/tags unless it is something I predict that I will need sometime in the future and won't just remember. Due to this, my Obsidian vault is pretty much a collection of a bunch of temporary to-do lists and then some folders with specific reference information. If I'm linking thoughts together I'm doing it real time in my head, anything else takes me too far out of my thought process.

I can see it if you are a person working in academia or a writer where you may be generating concepts that you want to link together in the future. But as someone that does project type work, I'm following too much of a defined process to see any benefit.

After saving, maybe you need some organization later, but most time they are just there. Most time you search content by categories, keywords, or tags.

I think we need right tools for different requirements.

My practical guide on setting up a smart notes / Zettelkasten / atomic notes Vault: https://bryanhogan.com/blog/obsidian-zettelkasten

Also wrote about how it fits into my overall Vault setup: https://bryanhogan.com/blog/obsidian-vault

I'm the end, I think we have maybe different uses for notes. Journaling, scratchpads, to-do lists, research, etc.

Take a methodology with a grain of salt. If it doesn't fit, there's a good chance it's solving someone else's problem, but you can always inform your own approach with it.

I can see how that could be useful in contexts where the work is about mulling over concepts, trying to uncover some hidden patterns. Philosophy, sociology, psychology come to mind. But looking at my large cache of notes on well known technology, I have a hard time seeing where the value would be.

I think it's worth pointing out because ZK pops up quite often on HN, as if it's the pinnacle of note taking. In reality, a lot of people here may just be wasting much of their time.

Personally, I use a "temporary -Zettelkasten" strategy in my inbox. But it's more that I just timestamp new notes.

The power of obsidian imo is that I can quickly organize those inbox notes into their respective project notes with the touch of a hotkey

And then again in the project note, the Obsidian editor features (mostly around useful hotkeys) allow me to quickly manage my notes how I see fit (no particular strategy here other than being heavily influenced by GTD)

Edit: Oh, I actually just found the comment from the author here, sounds like AI slop.

https://github.com/skiwithuge/brainstack

Actually, they thrive with raw notes and scattered documents. I hoard project information in Obsidian with deliberately very little structure: everything lives in a single directory, with optionally one category as a frontmatter value, and very light linking. I do not have to think when adding to this vault at all, it's a low-friction drop box. But an agent in this infodump can do absolute wonders using just search.

I had to force even LLM to answer properly, because it answered the same substanceless way. The only thing helped is to ask it, what distinguishes this to the web, wikis, or HATEOAS.

Amid all the fanaticism that grew around zettelkasten method the past few years people have forgotten and de-emphasized the fact that for Luhmann it was not a "second brain" to be referenced on demand, it was explicitly a system to support writing. It is tailored to help researchers write papers. It shines if you actually need a system in which to keep notions coherent and organized so that ideas are clear and citations precise when you need them during the writing process. If that's not you, the overhead probably isn't worth it. Just keep a notebook.

With AI, there's nothing stopping you from dumping a huge pile of information into a single folder and telling an AI what you want to make with it that day.