Capture everything, order nothing

I always wanted to have everything in order: things I’ve learned, project tracking, idea notes, meeting notes. I started with Notion — beautiful, sure, but until the bill shows up. I migrated to Obsidian a few years ago and was doing relatively well.

Relatively.

The vault was the exact reflection of my head: everything written down, nothing where it was supposed to be. Folders I didn’t remember creating, untitled notes from months ago, loose ideas mixed with technical decisions. I was spending more time organizing than thinking.

Until I gave AI access with a single directive: organize.

The system: three layers, three responsibilities

My brain for creativity. Obsidian for storage. AI for order.

Layer 1 — The brain: capture without friction

The only rule at this stage is no rules. When something seems interesting or important, I write it down. Without thinking about the right folder, without looking for the exact tag, without deciding if it “deserves” its own note.

That’s how a second brain works in practice: as an extension of memory, not as a bureaucratic archive.

Not writing it down costs more than writing it down wrong.

Layer 2 — Obsidian: structured storage

Obsidian is where knowledge lives. I have a folder structure that reflects the areas of my professional life:

Dev Knowledge/
├── 01 - Professional Development   # Blog, career, setup and configurations.
├── 02 - Knowledge Base             # Courses, certifications, architecture, snippets.
├── 03 - Primary Employment         # Full-time employment.
├── 04 - SaaS Projects              # Personal projects.
├── 05 - Consulting                 # Consulting, talks, collaborations, etc.
└── 99 - Templates                  # Reusable templates.

I don’t think about this structure when creating each note. I defined it once and the AI — or me, when there’s time — moves the notes to the right place afterwards.

Each folder has its own AGENTS.md: a file that describes to the agent the purpose of that space, what type of notes live there, and how to organize them. In the vault root there’s a general one that works as a quick reference for the entire system. The AI doesn’t guess where each thing goes — it reads it.

Defining a clear folder system makes later reorganization trivial. The mistake is trying to apply it in real time.

Layer 3 — AI: the order I don’t want to do manually

This is where I used to suffer :P. Now the AI agent on duty (because it’s simple and I don’t need the best model) acts on the vault with real context: it knows which folders exist, can read the notes, and understands the tag system.

Concrete use cases

Organizing accumulated daily notes

After weeks of unstructured note-taking, the agent reviews the set of notes and runs the cleanup: moves them to the right folder, assigns consistent tags, detects duplicates. What used to take me an afternoon of manual cleanup is now a delegated task.

Refreshing memory on readings

Many of my notes are quick annotations from articles or news. I don’t always write a final review or reflection. When I come back to that topic weeks later, the LLM “refreshes my memory”: I pass it the raw notes and it returns a structured summary with the key points.

Research synthesis

When I have several notes on the same topic scattered across the vault, the agent can connect them and generate a synthesis note: what they have in common, where they differ, what conclusion emerges from reading them together.

Extracting decisions and tasks from meetings

Passing raw meeting notes to the agent and asking it to extract decisions, tasks, and next steps is one of the most immediate uses. The same applies to WhatsApp chats or email threads — I’m still importing them manually for now, but once inside the vault the agent processes them the same way. The notes end up structured and saved in the right folder without me having to process them at the time.

The vault that was chaos — untitled notes everywhere — is still the same vault. The difference is that now it has someone to keep it in order.

The entire system is versioned in Git: every change is recorded, the history intact, synced to my phone. My notes always within reach, from any device.