Not note taking with Claude
TL;DR: Don't use AI to produce notes, but using it for semantic search and knowledge synthesis seems fine. Don't use it until you have a well ingrained note taking habit and at least 1 month of daily notes. Keep AI and human generated notes as separated as you can.
So a little while ago I finally relented and started paying for a personal Claude subscription, mostly to get access to Claude Code. As an Obsidian vault is just a directory filled with plain text Markdown files, Claude Code can seamlessly interact with the vault just by starting the CLI application in the vault directory. So am I freed from the burden of writing my own notes, now that I have a text generator that can do it all for me? Obviously not, but I think there's still some uses for it.
Meanwhile, as someone who likes digging around for old blog posts, I found a post on the topic of using AI for notes which is somewhat sceptical of the whole concept. It does so while dodging the whole issue of whether AIs 'can' or 'cannot' think or be original or any other argument in that vein, which seems irrelevant to the actual issues about using them to write notes. Even if von Neumann came back to life to write a perfectly crafted set of notes in your notebook, that doesn't mean you automatically learn whatever the notes are about. You still need to be able to read and understand the idea to actually apply it.
So what is my actual advice for using Claude Code (or any other AI tool) for your Obsidian notes? Of course I've been playing around with it for only a fairly short amount of time, but my basic principles for it are:
- If you have a daily note taking routine, those notes should be 100% written by you. If you don't have a daily note taking habit, don't use any AI until you have at least a month's worth of your own notes.
- Don't use it to fill up a blank note with 'content'. Summarise stuff in your own words if possible.
- Keep human and AI written notes separated. I already enforced this from the start due to my word count tracking goals (which obviously would be meaningless if AI generated text counted) so I have a specific directory for my Claude-generated notes which is ignored by my word counting script.
- In general optimising the form of your notes (using AI or otherwise) has very uncertain and quite possibly nonexistent gains so focus on keeping up with your own note taking, not the exact shape your notes 'should' take.