It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI

zazuke

While I use Claude a lot for my Omarchy plugins and Linux optimization/failure detection, I don’t use it for writing and note-taking, especially for coming up with unique ideas and driving them home by writing them through to the end. It's so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI.

synalx

I have this problem even in codebases. Claude will work on something, and add detailed comments in which it extrapolates the from the design and confidently states intentions and decisions which aren't actually grounded in reality. Then, later sessions suffer when it reads back those hallucinations and treats them as canonical.

empath75

I think having AI keep it's _own_ notes in Obsidian is a good idea because it makes them convenient for you to read, but yeah you need to quarantine agent ideas from your own ideas because otherwise you get bad cito-genesis problems. https://xkcd.com/978/

gdulli

What am I even here for if not to have my own ideas?

helsinkiandrew

There was a related study posted awhile ago: > When people think AI did the creative work, task meaning and effort decline https://www.brookings.edu/articles/when-people-think-ai-did-...

chessucation

i've been dabbling with various assistant models and instances and find that there's an interesting "idea" that pops up from their synthesis and relevancy analysis at a decent frequency. some kind of "inverse prompting" in which the machine has an angle, perspective, opportunity (based on the context it's working with/in) and the human turns those seedlings into something useful... or else decides its weed to be discarded.

SomeonesAccount

This is why I never use AI for ideas. Always my own ideas.

mohamedkoubaa

Brian, CTO complains that it's so hard for him to execute against the technical strategy communicated by that smart intern on the third day of his internship two years ago. Poor Brian.

GPerson

I have separate directories for human only files and ai files. I’m not doing anything that matters but it works for me.

mccoyb

I don't get the second brain thing. I don't keep a second brain, I just read and think a lot. I once did a physics masters and, when asked how to make steady progress, one of the professors (who had published with Paul Dirac no less) made the comment "well, my secret is that I think about physics all the time" I started practicing this for the stuff I'm interested in ... and the result is that I generate a lot of ideas. 99% of them are garbage. Before AI, a conversation with colleagues would help me weed out the garbage, and possibly give me a new perspective ("here's something surprising about what you just said!") Now, AI plays a helpful role in helping me weed out the garbage for the subset of ideas that I can test empirically -- and sometimes it does give me a new perspective, but with significantly more noise than my colleagues, who would take me right to the point that would be useful for me to see. I've never felt like I needed a second brain ... because if I had such a thing, I think I would be keeping the 99% garbage around -- instead I just let biology GC it.

Dependance

Could anyone enlighten me as to why to use Obsidian in one's daily life ? I have a dozen ideas popping a day and nothing comes close in terms of ease than a paper notebook for capturing and some apple notes equivalent for storage. Used to have a Notion but all the "Second Brain" movement seems...fishy to me ?

rootsudo

For me it’s the opposite, AI has helped me do the final 20% that I could never do, making execution more painless and more successful.

altairprime

Ironically, this is why one of the best ways to manage upwards is to prompt managers into coming up with your idea as if it were their own: they’re dramatically more likely to execute and deliver on it. Of course, this also obviously leads to undue credit given for coming up the idea, which is certainly a core problem with AI as well, but it’s still charming to watch managerial psych being rediscovered by this new generation of managers.

ssivark

> It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI Yes! And that's because you can't really delegate ownership/authorship to AI (at today's capability levels). Coding agents might have been RL'd out the wazoo to write code to solve well defined problems, but given a situation the onus of making sense of the ambiguity and identifying the problem -- and even crafting a skeleton for an acceptable solution keeping in mind tradeoffs -- needs to be done by a human taking ownership . I wrote about this recently from a slightly different angle [1], but the core idea is the same -- which is why it is hard to take over an idea mooted by AI. Before even writing/implementing, the AI has internally resolved ambiguity with several decisions which are arbitrary, and match neither your mental model nor the actual ground reality (which you need to spend time understanding in order to productively interpret). [1] https://woventhought.substack.com/p/ai-assistants-need-adapt...

r0b05

My second brain is 500 open tabs of Notepad++

sva_

The title is editorialized. It is "Keep AI Out of Your (Obsidian) Vault". For the Original title, I wish they added the qualifier "generative" for AI. You may well use e.g. embeddings to semantically search through your notes, and there are only gains in that. Having an AI write notes for you is however of course completely pointless. The act of writing notes is 80% of the reward.

WhyNotHugo

One of my main reasons for writing notes is that I learn while writing: the act of dumping information into textual format lets me re-think though all of it. Sometimes I pause and realise that I need to better understand something in order to put it into words. To explain a certain amount, I need to understand a wee bit more than that. Having an AI write notes would only produce text, but the actual notes are mostly a side effect — an important one, but not the most important one in note taking. I think hard about related notes, and peek at them when linking, sometimes finding interesting one-off connections. This makes me think further and sometimes expand the topics. Automated linking would not make me think, it wouldn't make me learn. It would just produce yet another pile of information that's already available online anyway.

nixonaddiction

ive never been able to use zettelkattsen. i like having daily notes instead of different notes for different ideas. its easier this way. my obsidian vault is a hybrid of diary and research and i am trying to separate the diary and research but its not easy tbh. (i suffer from a crushing urge to note that i "just ate a sandwich, was good" while liveblogging research and debugging.) that being said, i got a big kick out of feeding my daily notes into my local model. i had some more diary-like entries that i would never share with anyone, but it was extremely funny to have my local model take a 3000 word recap of what i did in a day and summarize it like "writer reflects on their job: they worry about their performance. meals: the writer ate oatmeal, and a sandwich. family: the author contemplates their fathers absence growing up." ive developed a really large corpus of written work over the years and am hoping to fine tune a model using my diary as the training set. i think this would yield hilarious results. keeping it all local though, i drop my passwords in there at times and i dont want that leaked.

layer8

> I’m a strong proponent of avoiding adding lots of AI-generated summaries or other on-the-fly-generated text to my vault. The reason is simple: over time, I don’t know anymore whether the content was written by me or by an AI The reason to not add it is that the quality of summarization will likely only in prove in the future, so it’s better to do it on demand whenever needed.

chadcmulligan

what happened to ideas are cheap - execution is everything. As Claude said to me when I said the same thing - it's not really its idea you had to ask the right questions. I find this true in some ways - asking the right question and finding out what the AI's have hidden inside them is like panning for gold imho.