Comment by kylenessen
19 hours ago
I really wanted to like this, but unfortunately couldn't see how it improves my experience over Obsidian or VS Code.
The fact that I have to juggle between OpenKnowledge and Codex to engage the AI, while also accepting a barebones Obsidian, is a real bummer. From what I can tell, you are saving me a few key strokes with moving prompts around. What I really want is the AI to live IN the app, like VS Code, and then move around the documents like it is Obsidian. I'll accept a plain terminal, but a pretty UI would feel like a better fit. My sense is that the new value add here is a set of skills and mcp servers, which probably already exist for Obsidian, or could more productively be spun up. I looked at the plugins again in Obsidian and found Claudian, which lets me bring my local models and Codex in the right pane. This is perfect, so sorry your app is not for me (yet), but thanks for getting me to look again at my tooling.
I want to throw my vote in for local models. Gemma4-31b is working well for me on these types of tasks, and not having an easy way to plug that in is a deal breaker. Embeddings should certainly have a local option, as they are cheap to compute. For what it is worth, I use LMStudio which supports OpenAI and Anthropic compatible api endpoints, so it should be easy to wire in.
A big caveat, I'm not trying to share my vault with other people, and I can see making that pain go away being worth switching. That said, I feel like you're targeting a weird market, where you want people technical enough to use LLMs and GitHub, but not so technical they can't customize a shared environment.
I would switch if the whole experience was self contained and "clean." Right now, it feels like a well dressed wrapper for pretty basic functionality.
Ack, thanks for feedback ! We're definitely looking at a more integrated experience.
Thank you for this project - I am excited to check it out!
My current agentic workflow is having a github repo that is a workspace and essentially a single obsidian vault over it called agents. I modify with Claude code (or other harness), check diffs in...VSCode and read it in...Obsidian.
It's separate from my actual personal Obsidian vault (that I don't send to any AI providers), and is only for agents. It's been really nice on all sorts of varied projects and for performing web research. I also have a bun monorepo setup in the root with varied tools for search, fetching individual websites, setting up folder structures - etc.
But essentially, in my experience, the moment you tell the model that it's in an Obsidian Vault - magic happens.
I am so curious how this will play in with it all and am hoping this will improve my workflow!
Got it yup, sounds like similar to the setups our team runs. Give it a shot and feel free to share any feedback.
To add one more thing: Codex/Claude/Cursor can open the OpenKnowledge web viewer within their own embedded web viewer. So you don't need the two apps open.
And we embedded the Claude terminal within the OpenKnowledge app itself if you prefer that. We are working on embedding the AI (including local models) more deeply within the app itself as well, expect updates in next week.
I have been trying to replace Obsidian with something for over 4 years now ever since I started using it. But I am just too comfortable now and I have it set up exactly the way I like and extended it with plugins etc.
I tried other stuff but nothing imo can beat its utility to me. I also personally wouldn't want an AI or anyone else looking through my vault or want AI in it.
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