alt Hacker NewsThe Zettelkasten method in Obsidian
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The article highlights that the real value of the ZK method is in the discovery of the deeper connections that run between ideas that on the surface may appear unrelated.
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.
Can anyone share agent skills that specifically help with the organizing, structuring, and linking of Obsidian files like a Karpathy style wiki? (Eg taking /raw content and processing it following some protocol)
I have written something similar! Used and improved my Obsidian setup through years of use.
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
It is too complicated. We just get, save or write something, maybe with some categories, keywords, or tags.
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.
I see a lot of people say you have to use methodology X, or that methodology Y is worthless.
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.
Having to manage links and tags for every note quickly makes the notion of a note system less than appealing.
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)
I really want to use Obsidian but it being closed source is a big No for me. I know I can keep all my files in plain text and move on to another platform buy the thing is: if a bunch of files and a FS were enough for me to keep my KB, then ofc I wouldn’t need something like Obsidian. The thing is I need something like Obsidian; a bunch of files lying around is not enough for me
I built the AS Notes extension for VS Code (https://asnotes.io) partly because I wanted to be able to write my notes with the support of other VS Code extensions, and because of the agent harness options in VS Code (copilot etc). The key thing for easy zettlekasten management is really good wikilink support in markdown. AS Notes supports nested wikilinking and automatic updating in the index on rename etc.
On a different note, the website feels a bit quickly AI generated just made to promote this desktopcommander app?
Edit: Oh, I actually just found the comment from the author here, sounds like AI slop.
What I'm taking issue in is the many opinions on how to build something really useful yourself. I love Obsidian, because it does what it does great - taking notes, easy and fast navigation, no bullshit. What I don't like is the urge to do so many things with it, todos, libraries, etc. Obsidian wasn't built for this. I had spent months improving my Obsidian setup when finally I realized I don't want to spend all this time on making a note-taking tool do something else. As a dev, naturally, I started developing my own stuff to be perfect for me, but not everybody can do that. Technical users might like spending hours implementing the perfect system for their lifes, but I think for everybody else it should be so much easier.
yeah the maintenance spiral is exactly why I gave up and just dumped everything into a GitHub repo. plain markdown files, no plugins, no drama. only problem is GitHub's renderer is kind of garbage for a real wiki. ended up having to build my own github wiki reader
Why on Earth, the chapter “What the Zettelkasten method actually is” doesn’t tell me what is this method? The same with the first result on Kagi. There are several paragraphs without saying anything worth saying. They have a very religious kind of feeling.
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.
I'm doing a similar system that works through a telegram bot and a self hosted instance
Please credit Sönke Ahrens and his 2017 book _How to Take Smart Notes_ for this system.
Zettelkasten is great for researchers. I actually don't think it's that valuable for practicing technologists. The general practice of taking notes and connecting ideas together is of course useful, but most technologists don't need such a sophisticated system.
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.
Is it just me, or does this link not actually point to an article or howto, but to a generic 'download / buy our tool' kinda page?
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Most people set up a Zettelkasten Obsidian system, but abandon it by month three. The method itself works. The problem is that most guides stop at day one and don’t address what comes after.
We’ll focus on both: how to set it up, and how to keep it running over time with the right habits and AI support. What the Zettelkasten method actually is (and what it isn’t) The Zettelkasten method (German for “slip box”) was popularized by German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. Over roughly 40 years, he created around 90,000 handwritten notes and used them to produce some 600 publications, including about 60 books. He referred to his Zettelkasten as his “second memory” and credited it as a key part of his output. Originally, the method was built for researchers drowning in information. People who needed to read, process, and connect vast amounts of source material.
Today, AI has created a new kind of knowledge problem. Large language models can’t do much with raw notes or scattered documents. LLMs work better with structured, clearly defined pieces of information that can be referenced and combined. The Zettelkasten format maps almost perfectly onto how AI knowledge bases need to be organized:
One idea per unit Clearly titled Richly connected
But before you set one up, you need to understand what Zettelkasten actually is. Because most people get it wrong from the start.
Systems like these made sense in the pre-AI era, where things needed to be organized at the outset to be useful later.
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.
How many people actually find utility from a Zettelkasten system?
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.