I have tried every note-taking system and personal knowledge base tool out there. Most of them became graveyards of half-organized notes I never read again. This AI-assisted setup is the first one that actually works for me.
The core problem
The problem was never capturing information. It was retrieval and synthesis. What good is a knowledge base if you cannot find what you need when you need it?
My current setup
- Obsidian as the local vault (markdown files, fully portable)
- An AI agent that processes and tags new notes automatically
- Weekly synthesis sessions where the agent summarizes what I captured
Capture workflow
Whenever I read something interesting or have an idea:
- Voice note if I am mobile (auto-transcribed)
- Quick paste into an inbox folder in Obsidian
- Nothing is organized at capture time - that creates friction
Every evening, an automated job runs over the inbox:
- Categorizes each note by topic
- Adds relevant tags
- Links related notes using similarity search
- Moves them out of inbox into the main vault
The synthesis step
Once a week, I run a prompt against recent notes:
Review these notes from the past 7 days. Identify the 3 most important ideas, any patterns or connections between topics, and what I should follow up on.
This takes me from 40 random notes to 5 minutes of actual insight.
What makes it work
- No perfectionism at capture time
- Automation handles the boring organization
- AI handles synthesis that humans are bad at (connecting distant ideas)
Tools you can replicate this with
- Obsidian + the Templater plugin for structure
- Any AI agent or Selenium workflow for the processing step
- A simple cron job or agent trigger to run the inbox sweep
Has anyone built something similar? What does your setup look like?
Curated by Selendia AI ðŸ§
