Obsidian’s CEO on why productivity tools need community more than AI

Welcome to Decoder! This is Casey Newton, founder and editor of Platformer and cohost of the Hard Fork podcast. I’ve had a lot of fun guest-hosting a few episodes of Decoder while Nilay is out on parental leave this summer. If you listened to the last couple of Monday shows, you know I’ve been doing a series with founders who are focused on productivity.

This is my third and, sadly, last time joining the show during the break, but I’m very excited about this episode. Today I’m talking with Steph Ango, who is the CEO of Obsidian.

Obsidian is a note-taking and productivity app that fits into a similar “second brain” space to Notion, the CEO of which I interviewed here on Decoder last week. But Obsidian differentiates itself with a really unusual approach to its business. It still wants to be your entire personal knowledge base — to hold all your notes, links, files, and other information — but it works in a very different way.

In Obsidian, files are Markdown-based, stored locally on your own devices, and completely free to use. You’ll hear Steph say that he doesn’t even know how many users Obsidian has or how sticky the software is, which is more or less unheard of among startups that I cover.

Obsidian does charge a subscription fee for access to certain features, including cross-device sync, version history, and web publishing. But it’s a model that feels decidedly old-fashioned, for software that’s trying to keep up with the current world, and so I had to ask him about those decisions.

Steph’s role as CEO is also unusual, because although Obsidian is still a very young, very small, and very flat organization, he’s actually not one of the founders. He joined in 2023, when cofounders Shida Li and Erica Xu [SHOO] brought him in based on his experience with his former startup, Lumi. He was also a huge Obsidian fan.

So I really wanted to ask him about that, too, because I suspected the answers to the big Decoder questions about organization and decision-making were going to be pretty unusual for a Decoder guest.

And in one interesting twist, I asked Steph why, when so many of his competitors seem to be racing to stuff their productivity products with AI features, it didn’t seem like Obsidian was all too eager to follow suit. His answer, I thought, was pretty illuminating.

So that’s Obsidian CEO Steph Ango. Here we go.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Steph Ango, you are the CEO of Obsidian. Welcome to Decoder.

Thanks, Casey. I’m glad to be here.

What is Obsidian? How does it work and who is it for?

If you really want to boil it down, Obsidian is a note-taking app. A lot of people use it for writing their thoughts down, journaling. A lot of people are students who like to track their progress through school, or do their research notes. There are authors, book writers, big fans of RPGs who love to use it. What makes Obsidian unique is that it sort of works like Wikipedia, in that the core unit is a link between your notes. So, if I was to write about my experience today in my journal, I’d say, “I was on the Decoder podcast with Casey,” and each time I mentioned something I might form a link out of “Decoder.”

It’s okay if that link is not pointing to anything yet, but later down the road, I might create a note for Decoder because I want to track some of the interesting interviews I’ve listened to on that podcast. So over time, your web of knowledge becomes greater and you have more nodes in your Obsidian. Fundamentally, when you open the app, it works a lot like Apple Notes, Evernote, Notion, or any other similar kind of app out there.

When you joined the company in 2023, you said, “I can’t overstate how life-changing Obsidian has been for me. It has fundamentally improved the way I think. I want to see what happens if more people gain that superpower.” What do you feel like is the superpower that Obsidian gave you, and why did no other products make you feel quite the same way?

I’ve been writing notes and journaling for over 20 years, and I’ve used a lot of different apps. This idea of thinking about the world like your own personal Wikipedia was really powerful. I had kind of kludged together a few different apps to make something that kind of worked that way. A lot of Wiki-based software already existed, but most of it was designed around publishing a full Wiki to the web as opposed to using it for your own personal notes.

When it came out, the founders of Obsidian, Shida [Li] and Erica [Xu], had already put in the level of polish that was not there in the glued together prototype that I had. It was instantly something that made sense to me. It made sense also because the data is stored is in this very durable format that people can own, which is called Markdown. You get super fans of Markdown and… for people who’ve never heard of it before in the audience. I’m not sure who —

I think we probably have a lot of Markdown users in the Decoder audience, but for those who have maybe not seen it yet, how would you describe it?

Basically, the oldest file types we have, going back to the 1960s, are plain text files. Markdown takes the idea of a plain text file, which is just raw text, and allows you to add basic formatting. So, if you want some text to be bold, a heading, a table, or a list, it allows you to use simple characters like punctuation marks to indicate what’s going to be bold or italic, for example.

The power here is that the data is stored in this very simple format. So, we have this view around your data that you can hold your data for a long time and you, or your kids’ kids, your legacy, whatever it is, will be able to read it 100 years from now. Maybe none of the notes matter at all, or maybe they’ll be curious. But what if that data could be preserved over the long term? We think that going back to some of the simplest formats that exist and giving you that control over your data is more likely to persist over time. So, that’s one of our philosophies.

Going back to your question, I was really excited about the principles coming together. To the point of how it made me think differently, I think once you have this concept of links and ideas that can be networked together, you can start to form more complicated, complex, or interesting thoughts than you otherwise could. I don’t know about other people, but I can only have two or three different ideas in my mind at once. But if you can start to create these little building blocks of ideas, you can combine them in interesting ways. Your ideas become these little Lego blocks that you can interchange and mix together, so you can start forming some interesting and complicated thoughts.

I would love to hear an example of when you felt like you were able to do that in Obsidian. You’ve written online about your note-taking practice. You described it for us a minute ago, talking about how you keep a daily journal and as new characters and ideas come in, you’ll link them and build them up over time. I’m curious about that next step. Is there a time when all of that added up to let you make something you maybe wouldn’t have otherwise?

Well, there are the projects I’m interested in. Even though I’m the CEO of Obsidian, I see it as a means to an end. I like to write, so I write a lot of short essays on my blog. A lot of the essays came from marinating in Obsidian, where I can debate with myself whether an idea is good or not. I have this essay called “Pain Is Information.” I was going through a pretty tough time a few years back, and I read this book by [Haruki] Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. It’s this autobiographical story about running, and I came across this quote… I’m trying to remember it on the fly, but it’s something like, “When you sign up for a marathon, you know that you’re signing up for pain.” “Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.”

That idea was really interesting to me because I was going through a painful time. I was thinking about how touching your hand to a stove gives you a signal that [doing] that’s a bad idea, but that’s information. So, I was starting to think about information, pain, and the relationship between those things. You can see how these ideas are forming out of thin air, out of different inspirations that I’m going through. And what I like about Obsidian is it gives you this place to approach it in a very freeform way and connect different concepts you might be thinking about.

For me it’s in this philosophical realm, but for other people it might be with biology or language learning. My partner speaks Chinese, and I’ve been wanting to learn Chinese, so I’m starting to bring together these different ideas. I’m into woodworking and I’m always learning new skills, new details, or new tools that I might want to use, and I’m doing research about that. All of those things can coexist inside of this digital place, which is kind of weird because you could have a connection between a woodworking tool, a city I went to in China, and the concept Murakami was describing, all those things are just ingredients in this soup, and you could start to come up with ideas that you just wouldn’t have thought of otherwise. Maybe that’s enlightening.

Something that a lot of people value about Obsidian and similar apps is that they can be engines for serendipity. You gather strings in the manner you just described, and then in the process of clicking back through your notes or using other tools inside the app, you revisit ideas and they spark new ones or you see connections that you might not have otherwise.

Definitely. I think that one of the benefits of this approach is that it’s quite freeform. What I’ve run into with other tools or other approaches, like a physical journal, is that you’re quite constrained by the fact that it’s just pieces of paper you flip through. It has the limitation of being a 2D surface. Or, a lot of apps use folders or tags, whereas here you don’t have to know what something is going to be about until later when the connections form. And you’re free to have 700 tabs open inside of Obsidian and be doing this crazy, It’s Always Sunny mind mapping with the red thread everywhere. It allows you to do that where something with a more top-down hierarchy would make it more difficult.

You’re not a co-founder of Obsidian. You were brought in as CEO in 2023. How did that come about, and what were you brought in to do?

The app came out in 2020, and I found out about it with the first version. It was right at the beginning of the pandemic, and I think all of us were going stir-crazy. There was this moment in time where a lot of interesting tools popped up because everybody was like, “What am I going to do with all this extra free time where I’m hanging out at home?” So, I started using it right away for the reasons I described before. It made sense, and Obsidian is super customizable, so you can make plugins, you can make themes, and you can modify it in really significant or small ways. I was just starting to put all these community things out there. I was running a different startup at the time, and I was just putting these things out there because I was making them for myself and people started using them.

Shida and Erica are amazing engineers who met at the University of Waterloo. They’re geniuses in terms of engineering and community management. What I was bringing to the table as a community member was a sense of design and product that they had a little less of. Because the Obsidian community is so strong, some of the things I was making were getting a lot of adoption, and I was collaborating with other people in the community. They found out about that and wanted to put a quote from me on their front page.

So, we started chatting, and then we started talking about business. They started telling me about the business model and some of the challenges that they were dealing with. We just kept talking for a couple years, and I was using Obsidian all the time. It was just the main app that I had. When I sold my previous startup, Lumi, I started to think what would be my next thing. I was thinking about building something else or starting a new company, and I just was spending all my time in Obsidian using the app, and I realized I was having so much fun using this tool.

So, I pitched to them, “What if I could come on board and help you guys?” At first, it took the shape of contract work, working with them as an advisor and working on the 1.0 release that had this new design that I built. Shida is an incredible engineer, one of the best I’ve ever worked with, and eventually, he just wanted to focus on that. It created this nice balance. We’re a really small team. We are seven full-time people, so there’s something nice about the balance of the different strengths we all have. Everyone can kind of do everything, but at the same time, each person has their core strengths.

For me, it’s around design, consolidating the true essence of Obsidian and trying to communicate it out to the world. Then, because we’re only seven people, there are a lot of hats to be worn, whether it’s accounting, legal, all these are random things. Also, I had a lot of experience running startups, so I think that was helpful.

You mentioned the plugin ecosystem. It seems to me that plugins have been one of the main ways that Obsidian has grown, both in its feature set and in building features that have attracted new users. What was the origin of plugins and how have they fueled the company’s growth?

In a way, plugins are what allow us to stay small because there are so many capabilities that people want that are fairly narrow and will only be useful to 1 percent or less of our user base. You see this all the time with apps that have been around for a long time, where the feature set just keeps growing and growing. Then the app becomes bloated, slow, and hard to use because there’s just too much functionality in there.

For new users, it becomes extremely confusing. I think initially, it was this defensive move against having to implement all these features, to basically say, “Here, you go do it.” And because it’s built on web technologies like JavaScript and CSS, a lot of people know how to build things for it because they know those languages. You don’t need to know Swift or be a cross-platform app developer to know how to make a plugin. You can make something really simple in a matter of minutes or hours depending on your level.

So, I think the initial reasoning was that this will allow us to not build everything ourselves. But then, the creative things people come up with are always pushing the envelope of what our API should be able to support and how the platform can allow even more flexibility. I mean, out of a few thousand plugins that exist, only a small portion that really make sense to be in the core app. Some of them do end up becoming something we notice, like when 80 percent of the user base is relying on one plugin.

For example, right now we’re working on this thing called Bases, which allows you to view your notes in a database-type format, and there are a number of plugins that do something like that in the Obsidian community. So, it’s a signal to us that this is actually really important and should be in the core app.

What are some other plugins that have just been really popular or took the app in unexpected but successful directions?

Some of the most popular ones are very simple. Somebody who’s on the team today, Tony Grosinger, wrote this plugin called Advanced Tables, which was just a way to simplify making tables in Obsidian. We’re talking about something very basic, but rows and columns were difficult to do earlier on, and if you’re someone who wants to live completely in the Markdown world, they’re kind of tricky to make. We ended up hiring Tony, and he built that functionality alongside another developer who — basically everyone we’ve hired or worked with was once a community plugin author or team developer. That makes it really easy for us to start bringing the right people who are passionate about Obsidian on board.

There are plugins about theming, styling, changing fonts and colors. A lot of people enjoy that customizability and want to be able to make this journal space their own. There are a lot of plugins that help you integrate with other services. So, if you want your calendar in there or something like that, you can do that. There are integrations into a million different apps out there. If you want to be doing your tasks and to-do lists in Obsidian, there’s a whole bunch of plugins that help you with that. The cool thing about that is if you’re interested in Obsidian because you want to do world building for your RPG tabletop group, you can do that and you don’t have to have the entire calendar functionality inside of your Obsidian. You can just use the plugins that have to do with that.

Plugins were really the first thing that brought Obsidian to my attention. I’d been using Roam Research, which I do credit for inventing a lot of the current note-taking paradigm, but Obsidian just developed much faster thanks to plugins. I’m curious what you did to attract those first developers. Was it as simple as having a really good API that was available early on? What was it that the company did?

I think it’s a combination of things. One, like I mentioned, is that the languages and framework are very simple for anyone to use. Anyone who’s done any kind of web development would pretty much know how to build a plugin, so it’s very accessible to a lot of developers.

The values of Obsidian, just as a pure note-taking tool, are very aligned with what developers like. So, a lot of developers use Obsidian as their note-taking app of choice because it’s private and it uses this Markdown format as the core way to write text. Because it’s so customizable, it attracts developers and then developers use it all day long. We have published APIs that pretty much allow you to do anything with the app, and there’s a lot of documentation. So, it’s that combination: a lot of developers are using it, it’s easy to make the plugins, and we added the API very early on. If you have that itch, you can scratch it very quickly. If Obsidian’s not working the way you want, you can change it very fast.

Recently, I interviewed Ivan Zhao of Notion for Decoder. You mentioned Notion is another product in this space that sometimes people might choose over Obsidian. It strikes me that while your products do some of the same things, they’re designed very differently. Notion is about pixel-perfect polish and beautiful interface elements. Obsidian, by default, can look a bit more like a terminal. You take notes in Markdown, and it has more of this DIY, almost hacker ethos. Is that intentional and do you think it affects the kinds of users you attract?

I think the fundamental difference between Obsidian and Notion is that Notion is a cloud service. It’s an app that interfaces primarily with software as a service-type cloud service. You have to either be in your browser or on an app, and you connect to a source of truth that’s in the cloud. With Obsidian, all your data is local. So, if you’re not online — if you’re on a plane or something like that — you always have access to your data. That difference shapes a whole bunch of other things.

For example, it would be really hard to add plugins to Notion because it can’t make it easy to run arbitrary code on its cloud-based platform, whereas with Obsidian, it’s pretty easy. So, there’s this fundamental split that occurs because of the architecture. It’s the same with things like theming, design, and how much user interface customizability there is. I don’t know if this will make sense to anyone who’s listening, but when I was 11 or 12 years old, there was Winamp, Winamp 2 was coming out, and I was all about making themes and things for Winamp, which was a music player that you could customize.

It really whipped the llama’s ass. I have to say that.

Absolutely. I think there’s a bit of that flavor in Obsidian. Obsidian is quite popular with a lot of younger people, and I don’t know what it is. At that time, you have the energy and the desire to have control over your digital space, and Obsidian makes that easy. So in that sense, we’re a bit less prescriptive about what the interface should look like, even though we’re trying to make it a little bit more approachable to still retain infinite depth. It’s like you’re going to the beach: we want to make the shallow waters a little more accessible for people who are coming into it, but then you can swim as far as you like, as deep as you like, into the complexity of Obsidian. Finding the right balance between those two things is quite challenging, and it’s something we’re always working on.

As I mentioned, I used Roam, then I used Obsidian, and then I used Mem. Now I use something called Capacities. Obviously I have a huge problem. I’m working on it in therapy. But I’m curious about how sticky Obsidian is. It’s free to get started, but I imagine lots of people abandon their vaults after only creating a few free notes. What makes people leave and what makes people stay?

We actually don’t know how many users Obsidian has. We don’t know how sticky it is because we don’t have any analytics. It’s very privacy-oriented, so we don’t track anything about our users. We don’t know what suddenly causes someone to churn or whatever. We prefer not to track those things. Also, the data doesn’t have to be exported. If Obsidian went out of business someday, you would still have the app on your computer. Even if you chose not to use it, you don’t even have to launch the app. You don’t have to export anything. This is one of the big issues people have had with other tools that have either gone out of business or been acquired by private equity firms that start tightening the screws and increasing the pricing over time — you feel like you’re locked in and you can’t do anything about it.

With Obsidian, your data is there. I think the feelings of freedom and security are paradoxically quite sticky because even though you have all your data, you could just… Personally, I’m constantly editing my Obsidian files not in Obsidian. I will use code editors and other tools to do mass modifications to hundreds of files. You can run Python scripts on your data. You can kind of do anything because they’re just files at the end of the day.

Just briefly, every file that is created in Obsidian is a Markdown file that can be opened up in basically any text editor.

Yeah. So it’s not a database in the cloud. It’s not a database on your computer somewhere that other apps can’t access. It’s literally just a bunch of files that you can move and change with any app. So yes, it makes it a lot easier to leave the app, but it also paradoxically gives people comfort that they have that option at any time.

We’re not trying to be Notion. Notion has raised hundreds of millions of dollars. I think it’s amazing, especially on the collaboration side. It has a lot of advantages that make the app better for certain things. We’re just a small team. Our focus is to keep making the tool better and stay small, as long as we’re making enough money to stay afloat.

We’re not trying to take over the world. We’re not trying to be the next Microsoft. That makes it a lot easier to make long-term decisions that we feel are better for ourselves or for our users. It’s the tool that we want to use all day long. So, it’s okay if people leave. And different people have different brains and different approaches to thinking, so maybe they should leave. Maybe that would be better for them.

Let me ask you about one challenge I’ve had using tools like this. I wrote a couple of years ago about how I had spent years linking and tagging all my notes, reviewing them on a pretty regular basis, and still not feeling like I was getting a ton of insights from that process. I was worried that these tools can be a substitute for thinking rather than an enhancement because if you spend all day tending to your digital garden, you might not spend as much time just walking down the street and giving your brain the chance to breathe and ideate. Was I just using these tools incorrectly, or do you think that productivity tools can sometimes be counterproductive for people?

I think they can sometimes be designed with anti-patterns that are explicitly about that. Some companies have metrics that they track, like the number of active users, but how do they define active? So now they’re sending you notifications to remind you to come back to the app so that you do whatever the thing is. That’s part of the reason we’re not interested in having any of this data because we don’t really want to be tracking our users in this way or incentivizing them to create usage where none is needed. If you use Obsidian throughout the day and you have these random ideas you just want to drop inside of your daily note, you should be able to do that and not get sucked into this thing that’s trying to engage you.

There are a lot of people who keep trying new apps and nothing sticks for them or they get caught up in the organization and beautification of their notes. I think that can happen in any app. I hear about this, in general, and I don’t know what the cause is. My sense is that it has nothing to do with the apps unless they’re literally trying to engagement-bait you in these weird ways. I think it’s sort of an affliction of the digital age. These things are so malleable that it scratches an itch that we have in our brain to optimize. For certain people who love solving puzzles or doing Sudoku, it’s kind of addictive in a way that might not be the most healthy.

I’m not exactly sure how to solve that. The way I try to address that, at least in my personal life, is being very aware of how the business of many of these apps works and how they’re trying to capture your attention and time. So, I’m always disabling notifications for everything, trying to spend a lot of time walking in nature, doing woodworking, cooking, and other activities that I find restorative. Then, that makes my Obsidian time feel more rewarding, productive, and useful because — productive is not the right word. I just have things to write about. I have a life that I’m trying to dissect. “Oh, what happened today?” or “What problem am I trying to solve?” And if you don’t have those other things going on, then you don’t have something to write about, and you’re now in the space massaging something. This is probably more of a question for a psychologist to solve, but I do see it, and I don’t know what the answer is necessarily.

Well, let’s ask the Decoder questions. You’ve mentioned that you have seven full-time employees. How is Obsidian structured? That sounds like a pretty flat structure.

We have two people who are working on community related things full time — essentially customer service and plugin review. One of the ways that we scale is that we have very active communities on Discord, Reddit, and elsewhere. There’s a lot of user help, so users help other users, which is nice because it means that we don’t have to have as many customer service people on staff.

Then, we have three full-time engineers, me, and then Erica, who works on marketing, community, and other things. I suppose I’m the only person who’s a trained designer, so I end up doing a lot of UX design, marketing related things, and our web-facing stuff. But in recent years, I’ve also taken on more. I’ve picked up a lot of engineering skills and have been enjoying collaborating more on the technical side as well.

It sounds like you’re giving yourself a lot of tasks. I would be careful of that.

It’s okay. I was previously running this startup that had 45 people. It was a very different thing. I was in meetings all day long, every day, 10 hours a day. At Obsidian, we have one meeting per year, so my time is very —

Wow. Goals! You just made a lot of people very jealous right now.

I think it’s achievable. We use Discord and our Slack equivalent to chat as a team all the time, and we’re in there consistently talking. But in terms of synchronous meetings, it’s quite rare. I think part of it is because everyone’s a user of the app, knows what something Obsidian-y feels like, and we generally only have one or two goals at any given time. So, it makes things quite self-motivated as far as how the team functions.

We’ve mentioned that Obsidian is unique in a lot of ways. There’s no signup requirement. You can download and use it for free. You guys don’t even know how many users you have. People can create an unlimited amount of notes. How is that sustainable for you?

Obsidian has a few different revenue sources. One is Obsidian Sync. You probably want to use Obsidian on multiple devices, so a phone, iPad, or computer. Because the files are local to your device, you need a way to keep those versions in sync. You can totally sync your files using Dropbox, iCloud, or Google Drive. There are many different services out there, but we make our Obsidian Sync service. We think it’s the best one because it’s totally integrated into the app, and it has a few features like version history. It’s end-to-end encrypted, so it’s much more secure than a lot of the other options by default. So, that is one of our major revenue drivers.

Publish is another service where you can take your notes in Obsidian and make a website out of it. Then, we also have a couple donation programs, which are Catalyst and our commercial license where users who want access to the beta versions or want to support us because they believe in what we’re doing can essentially send us money.

So, those are the main ways that we make money. We have merch, but it’s actually all breakeven, so we don’t really make any profit from that. The thing is, because the team is small, we don’t need mountains of cash. It’s just us and some computers, so it’s not like there’s a large amount of expenses. So it works.

Yes. It’s been profitable pretty much since day one. Since I think even before Sync launched — the donation program, Catalyst, was the first thing that launched — so it’s been profitable for five years.

Let me ask the other big Decoder question. How do you make decisions at your company? Do you have a framework?

We have this manifesto that you can look at. In a way, I think that is our most powerful driver because it describes our values, which are to make this app that’s super private, super customizable, and durable around these files that hopefully you’ll be able to own for the rest of your life. The community is always driving us towards the next big problem.

For example, last year one of the big things we started working on was Web Clipper. A lot of other apps have something like it. I think Evernote was probably the first one that did a really good job with this back in the day. Then, there are services like Pocket that shut down recently. A lot of people in the community were saying, “Hey, this is a major hole, a gap for Obsidian. All these other apps have great web clipping tools.” So, we built one. I think that whether it’s through plugins or through just general complaining from the compute community, we kind of know what the biggest gaps are. So, we always have a general idea of what we want to work on next.

But there’s also a self-motivated aspect to it. Because our team uses it all day, someone will become an advocate or champion for something. For example, I’m always using the iOS app, and I’m always coming across edge cases where I feel like there’s too much friction. There are other people on our team who use Android, use Linux, or who use Obsidian in a slightly different way. It kind of becomes your mission internally.

I don’t think this is really that different from other companies. But it kind of becomes your flag to raise with the rest of the team and convince them that this is an important problem that we have to work on now. Because the organization is so flat, we can make decisions very easily. It’s also very easy for one person to go off and prototype something for a few days and show it to the team and say, “Hey, solve this problem. Help me get this polished so we can release it.”

So, that makes it really, really fun. And because we don’t have investors or any top-down pressure forcing any deadlines, it’s very self-motivated. I’m sure there are lots of people in the community who wish we would release things faster, but we don’t want to give up the freedom, flexibility, and joy that we have building it.

Let me end on a few questions about the future. Virtually every major company that’s making a productivity tool is incorporating some generative AI feature or integrating an AI plugin or API. What is the Obsidian view on AI and productivity tools? Will you add features like that?

So far, there are no AI options built into Obsidian except in Web Clipper, which is intentional because it lives outside of Obsidian itself. In Web Clipper, we have a feature called Interpreter that allows you to put in a bunch of prompts or questions at the time you’re capturing a webpage, like if you want to fill in metadata about that page or say who the author is.

Let’s say you’re saving products because you’re doing research on what podcasting microphone you want to buy next. You could grab all the metadata and specifications automatically just by putting in a prompt, and it will kind of save all of that. But that’s living outside of Obsidian and it’s not about replacing your thinking. I think the fear I have with AI is that I don’t want it to replace thinking in my own use, the insights that I’m going to gather with a summary generated by AI.

Now, there are tons of people using AI with Obsidian. Because of the plugin architecture, AI is by far the most popular category of new, up-and-coming plugins right now. There are a lot of plugins that people are making using AI. A lot of the LLMs are very knowledgeable about Obsidian and its API. You can just go into Claude and say, “Hey, make me an Obsidian plugin that this or that.” That’s a big challenge for us because there’s a mountain of plugins growing really quickly that we need to review, and it’s happening faster than we can keep up with because AI makes it so easy to make plugins.

So, AI is definitely being used. Our philosophy as far as how it would ever make sense for Obsidian is that it has to fit with the principles that are in our manifesto, which is that it would have to be private. We’re not comfortable with the idea that our users’ data could be stored in OpenAI servers without their consent. I think a lot of tools out there are just kind of defaulting to this feeling that there’s an arms race. We’ve got to put AI into everything. Let’s put a little magic button everywhere. I don’t think that’s us. We want to give users confidence that their thoughts are theirs, that things are not going to be used to train the next LLM.

That said, I do think AI can be really powerful for certain uses. So the question is, in the long term, do we end up giving an API to the plugin community so that they can build those types of functionalities more easily? Right now, we’re not working on it. We’ve been holding off and watching what’s going on. We don’t feel a sense of urgency to suddenly put all these things in there because, to be honest, the plugin ecosystem is there for you and you can do it if you really want that. There are things much more important to us on the priority list that we want to work on first, that we would rather set our time aside for with our limited capacity.

Let’s talk about the medium to long-term future of Obsidian. What does it look like when 95 percent of its features are built? What do you hope it does that it can’t quite do today?

The sands are always shifting. We have operating systems that are changing. We’re built on top of macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android. We have to keep Obsidian working on all those platforms. That work is never-ending and challenging. But it’s hard to imagine what would happen first: we run out of ideas and features or something radically different comes along that people want to use instead of Obsidian. I have this point of view that Obsidian is not necessarily going to last forever.

There’s going to be a point in time — I don’t know if it’s in five years, one year, 10 years, 50 years — where we’re not going to be using these exact same kinds of apps. I don’t know what is going to replace it, or if we’re even going to be using computers in the same way. Interfaces may change very radically. I’m not sure what it is. I do feel confident that the files you create will end up being really important in that new world. We’re seeing that with AI actually because it turns out that all of the LLMs speak Markdown and are using it behind the scenes because it’s just plain text, and that’s what LLMs are good at.

But I don’t know the answer to your question. It’s hard to imagine a world where we completely run out of ideas. It seems more likely that we will just die of old age as an app. Maybe five years from now we will have some other idea for an app that we want to work on. But it’s hard to imagine just running out of things to work on.

What’s the next thing that you’re working on?

Right now, it’s a feature called Bases. The idea is that you can store properties, or metadata about the current file, in Obsidian notes. For example, if I have a note about Decoder, I might put the name of the host and a list of episodes. For each episode that I want to take notes on, I might write down which guests were on, what date it came out, or the episode number. What Bases allows you to do is visualize a certain kind of note as a table or eventually as a Kanban view or another type of view. So, it’s like a visualization layer on top of the data that you already have. We just make it really easy to create that database from the bottom up.

It’s kind of like a backward database because all the data is already in there. You’re just looking at it and saying, “Show me all notes that have the ‘books’ tag,” for example, or a link to “Casey.” Then, I get a table and then I have all my metadata, which I can edit. It’s quite powerful if you’re someone who enjoys tracking books that you read, or the movies that you watch, the places that you go, the articles you’ve read. You can very easily create these structures or do project management.

So, we’re having a lot of fun with that. It’s been way more popular than we expected. It’s currently in beta, so hopefully we will be releasing the first public version in the near future. Then, I expect that we’re going to be working on this until the end of the year or even longer because the feedback has been so positive.

Well, if you want to send any of those notes that you took about me, I can take a look and let you know if there are any errors.

Yes, no problem. Just don’t get too obsessed with tweaking the fonts and everything.

[Laughs] I’ll try not to. I’m always at risk of doing that. Steph, thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you, Casey. It was great.

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