notes, ai, obsidian and returning to logseq

about a year ago i switched from logseq to obsidian for notetaking while digging deep into the whole second brain rabbit hole. Using Claude Code with Obsidian seemed like such a revelation: you can have a knowledge base of all the things, and you don’t even have to write it yourself.

Wait…

How good is a knowledge base when you don’t even write it yourself? I remember reading about a study that it’s more natural for your brain to memorize facts and ideas when you write them yourself instead of just reading about them. Knowledge that i only spec out, but never actually write about feels like the worst variation of knowledge. But i stood with it: I spend more time refining the individual rules for my obsidian vault than actually taking notes, because it was just a claude session where i prompted things like:

• today i received my yubikey, please give me 10 ideas i should use it for
• i just finished my current espresso bean, rate it a 9/10 and find other roasters i could order from
• i just ordered a second homelab server, what should i put there?

and the answers were always some elaborated, well¹-written descriptions and texts that are probably helpful, but not actually something that i would’ve written. The fact that i always think that the more text there is the more likely it is to contain the correct information that i actually wanted to keep, i went with it. Slowly it dawned to me that starting the day with please create todays note. is just nonsense. Yeah sure, a steady structure is nice, having some generic information and structure to your daily note is nice. But i figured that this is not how MY brain works, and i don’t want to try to change how my brain works, i want to use tools that complement the way my brain works.

I guess that was about two or three weeks ago - because that was when i just stopped caring about Obsidian and the whole note-taking, braindumping, pseudo-zettelkasten approach. I just stopped; and it’s not like i don’t remember what i did, i just don’t have ‘proof’ anymore.

Then i remembered that i used to love logseq and that probably the whole journal-y² approach felt much more natural to me. So i dipped my feet back in and it felt like the right place. In an instant.

And then - to fulfil my whole fire-and-forget approach to notetaking - i found lsq and wrote a small fuzzel script to auto-append whatever i write or paste into that modal input box to my daily note. I can now just put stuff there without having to switch screen, workspaces, tools or context. Which is - truth be told - exactly my way of notetaking.

I can still sort them, i can expand on them, turn them into pages, tags - but my brain is clean for the time being.