Personal knowledge base

Personal knowledge management has a survival problem. People build elaborate Notion second brains, abandon them in three months, switch to Obsidian, abandon that, end up with three half-finished systems and zero net benefit. The systems that survive share two properties. They're easy to capture into, and the act of resurfacing happens automatically instead of requiring discipline.

The posts here are about what those long-running PKMs look like. How people who've been running a personal knowledge base for years actually use it day to day (spoiler: almost never via manual browsing, almost always via search or AI lookup). What capture habits compound versus which ones decay. How to structure a vault so the cost of adding a new note is near zero, even if the cost of retrieving it later is also near zero. How AI changes the math entirely. When an LLM can read your whole knowledge base, the structure matters far less than the capture rate.

You'll also find more opinionated takes here. The case against folders. The case for backlinks over tags. The argument that the second-brain era ends the moment LLMs can read raw markdown directly. Pick the ones that match your stage.