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- Hacker News
- I recently moved from Obsidian to a self-hosted Outline. Primarily because I needed an easy to use solution for sharing a knowledgebase with the team. Obsidian doesn't do team. Notion appears to, but Outline fit the bill so well, and was free. It has an MCP server, just like Notion.
I do wish that there was a way to provide filesystem level access to the markdown files to an AI agent. I think that might be faster.
by cheema33 - Let me know if you see any gap with OpenKnowledge an this scenario. It's exactly what we aimed to solve (files are markdown and local, sync and team sharing happens via git/GitHub but is abstracted away from user).by engomez
- Nothing personal, but there genuinely ought to be consequences for using "open source" in the context of something like this tied to proprietary AI services.
Local models should be the first choice in that framing.
by jrm4 - It's not tied at all, the AI integration is on top of. So OSS applies to the app itself.by pylotlight
- Integration with local models/harnesses is top the queue. What IDE or Harness do you use?
We're looking at OpenCode/Zed next but open to input.
by engomez - Electron apps tend to fall down in the minutiae of the little things that native apps get right (around things like selection, scrolling, various small affordances across various levels). Would love to see something like this be more native app upfront, than starting out with something that will always leave that top 10% of what makes a nice feeling app unobtainable.
You win hard on this if you have the best possible UX that feels natural to drive. You just also ran if not because obsidian/notion etc. are already there (and have the people to put into those random edge cases that make electron apps bad).
by joshka - This is a very mac-centric view. It makes business sense to plan for multiplatform.by wollowollo
- Yup. Much as I love the idea of Obsidian, for instance, I find it in an uncanny valley of almost a Mac app but not. That makes it feel stranger to me than something like Emacs, which doesn’t bother even trying, and so doesn’t feel as weird.by kstrauser
- I'm working on a PKM myself, and while wysiwyg won't be my first priority and I'm aiming for a more hackable surface, this is very interesting and I'll most likely take inspiration from it for integrating AI workflows into my notesby meghanto
- Nice approach.
Personally I’ve been trying very hard to migrate away from git+Obsidian project setup according to the OpenAI Harness Engineering. It works wonderfully in Codex Desktop.
The only gotcha - I want to share knowledge bases with the team in a way that is:
(1) versioned (a la git, not Notion) (2) usable from any chat (a la MCP) (3) basic access controls for team setup. (4) works through the interface that optimizes accuracy and token use across agentic architectures and LLMs.
Funnily enough, 4 is the easiest one (I have a platform for agent training and verification where I publish fun challenges for agents in simulated worlds around agentic commerce and personal OSes. With 98M agentic interactions recorded, that is already enough information for tuning)
Still figuring 1 and 3, though.
by abdullin - Gotcha. We're optimizing for the same scenarios, may be worth a look at our implementation in case transferable to yours. See:
#1 - the "autosync" and GitHub integrations do exactly this.
#2 - The app auto-instals skills/MCP server configs for a few harnesses
#4 - We embedded agentic-search capabilities via the MCP server (e.g. we virtualize 'ls' and 'cat' so we can enrich it for the agent for better hierchical navigation).
by engomez - I don't understand how Obsidian, a collection of markdown files, isn't already AI friendly. It's hard for me to imagine a more AI-friendly but still usable way to organize your notes.by culi
- What we did to go "beyond" is build in skills and an MCP server into the app, and auto-install those into e.g. Claude, Codex, and Cursor formats. Also added a web viewer so that e.g. Claude Desktop can open up the editor directly within it's embedded web viewer.by engomez
- This. I just open the Obsidian folder (aka "vault") in VS Code and BOOM, it is AI friendly. I just hack on the .md files like I would code with Copilot.by outside1234
- Is this following the Open Knowledge Format proposed by Google earlier this month or just a name collision?
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/how-th...
by iamacyborg - Two bits:
1. Name collison happenstance. We'd locked in the npm package and domains prior to their announcement.
2. Our templates are Open Knowledge Format compliant and we have an explicit quickstart around making an OKF knowledge base. You can think of OKF as a format/standard for the content, and OpenKnowledge (our app) as an IDE/editor for any type of markdown based content.
by engomez - For ages I've been looking for a way to easily share & sync a simple knowledgebase (HTML/MD and other files in folders) with my team (= including non-technical people), using Git as the sync/versioning layer, without it being too technical, and without getting vendor lock-in with expensive & unnecessarily complex cloud-based platforms.
Having built-in AI integration without relying on sketchy plugins would be the cherry on top (although, seriously missing the option to connect with any openai-compatible LLM provider like someone else mentioned here).
Seems like this might almost offer exactly that? I'll have to try it out...
by vekker - That was our exact stated goal -- felt a lot of the same pain. Feel free to drop me any feedback here or @nickgomez on X.by engomez
- You should just integrate with pi.dev, like I did for https://github.com/rcarmo/piclaw (which has replaced Obsidian for me). I too integrated a terminal and a WYSIWYG Markdown editor (as well as plugins for a mindmap, kanban, etc.)by rcarmo
- Looks very relevant, will take a look. Definitely looking at built-in-chat-ui, thinking about how to integrate with the harnesses.by engomez
- Congratulations on the launch. It looks neat!
On a side note, I find it interesting that a few recent projects are going for the Open Knowledge name. The Open Knowledge Foundation (https://okfn.org) is one of the first/largest proponents of the open data movement (think of it as a Free Software Foundation but for data, not software). They started in 2004 and developed many of the open data licenses and widely used infrastructure tools like CKAN (an open data portal platform).
Nothing to add, just found it interesting.
Disclaimer: I worked there for a few years.
- by K_Stoffregen
- Biased but great name of course haha.
OKF timing was coincidence, we'd started I take it around the same time they'd started internally.
What's good is that everything is pretty open formats/source and complimentary.
by engomez - Fully local, but can't integrate with any local LLM?
I do think a fully OSS Obsidian-like that syncs natively is an impressive accomplishment, though the usefulness of this is limited with OSX being the only supported platform. If an Android app is in the works I'll definitely follow the project!
by pcthrowaway - Got it. MCP Server and CLI is agent-agnostic, so should work with local models/harnesses, but we'll look into more explicit docs around this.
What IDE or harness do you use? We'll take a look.
by engomez - 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.
by kylenessen - 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.
by engomez - Ack, thanks for feedback ! We're definitely looking at a more integrated experience.by engomez
- 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.
by altmanaltman