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.

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.

My current agentic workflow is having a github repo that is a workspace and essentially a single obsidian vault over it called agents. I modify with Claude code (or other harness), check diffs in...VSCode and read it in...Obsidian.

It's separate from my actual personal Obsidian vault (that I don't send to any AI providers), and is only for agents. It's been really nice on all sorts of varied projects and for performing web research. I also have a bun monorepo setup in the root with varied tools for search, fetching individual websites, setting up folder structures - etc.

But essentially, in my experience, the moment you tell the model that it's in an Obsidian Vault - magic happens.

I am so curious how this will play in with it all and am hoping this will improve my workflow!

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.

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!

What IDE or harness do you use? We'll take a look.

edit: This seems to be "team-oriented" rather than geared towards individuals who might want to edit their notes from multiple devices?

And only seems to be able to sync with github... In addition to my privacy concerns, I'm curious if there could be issues with lots of images and other attachments since git can choke on repos that contain lots of larger files without github's git-lfs extension.

Last question I have is if any plugin system comparable to Obsidian's is planned (or already supported)? I realize this is probably a massive ask for an open-source project, and something Obsidian gets a lot of flack for as well, so I'm certainly not expecting it, but I am curious if it's on the roadmap already

Feel free to ping me any additional feedback any time (here or @nickgomez on X).

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.

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.

This is different to the Open Knowledge Format announced by Google in June 2026.

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...

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/how-th...

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.

https://github.com/jacquescorbytuech/crm-open-knowledge-wiki

https://github.com/jacquescorbytuech/running-knowledge-base

Our goal was you wouldn't need a separate IDE and to work well with the coding agent desktop apps.

But alas -- markdown files on your local machine is indeed the way for being AI friendly.

I don't think I'd seen an extension that does that. It was a technically very hard problem, rich text editors usually use a lossy intermediary format (e.g. prosemirror).

I use Obsidian as a persistent context store and knowledge graph (..loosely defined, i.e. link/back-link) for both Claude Code and Hermes, while also using it to generate live Wiki pages for working documentation. The native replication and the Git integrations work well keeping it all synchronized across multiple harnesses, as well. I use the native MCP server mentioned above, plus just letting the agent work with the markdown files directly.

That said, having built out all of this manually I'm excited to try out something that addresses much of this out of the box. I'd also be curious about the integration with Hermes/OpenClaw/etc.

Large inspiration for OpenKnowledge was providing these flows out of the box.

We'll prioritize Hermes/OpenClaw guides next.

Feel free to drop me any feedback as you try it out - @nickgomez on X.

Making the skills/MCP specific to OpenKnowledge allows us to optimize experiences like that.

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.

#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).

So changesets have to be atomic across multiple documents and semantic (so that agents can resolve the changes). Weak per-document versioning isn’t enough here.

#4. Nice! Same story, but also virtualizing ripgrep, find and tree (plus MD-aware outline mode). With that setup even agents with weaker local models (eg runnable on DGX Spark) can solve complex tasks in the Agentic Commerce domain.

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).

Local models should be the first choice in that framing.

We're looking at OpenCode/Zed next but open to input.

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.

I'd love to see support for Bases and obsidian plugins that are typescript/open source anyway - I use a few such as excalidraw/mermaid etc.

I also want to use my local model.

When collaborating on Notion, we had to pop into Google docs for comments, suggestions and history. I see this as important even when working with AI on something.

> Added ok to your PATH — managed block in ~/.zshrc, ~/.config/fish/conf.d/open-knowledge.fish.

Took a while to see that 'ok' is the name of your product.

This is mostly a Claude problem

So far the closest thing to what I want is using Claude Code in the mobile app to work in some repo and tell it not to write code, just have a discussion, and then eventually ask it to write the md doc or whatever.

I can then add that GitHub repo to a claude.ai 'Project' files and chats within the project can see the contents, but can't write back to it unfortunately.

Did you look at the OKF repo from Google? Open Knowledge seems to be a common term these days for similar solutions. I think OKF is more of the protocol for wiki-for-llm while you have more of the bells and whistles

Our templates follow it and we have a starter pack for it.

You can think of our app as a general purpose IDE for any knowledge base/wiki/markdown.

Docs: https://openknowledge.ai/docs/workflows/supporting-open-know...

Let us know if any feedback.

e.g. I have a plugin that when triggered reads a text and asks the LLM whether there are unclear points and unwarranted leaps of reasoning.

Links: https://slite.slite.page/p/5XOO7_tII0D87T/Importing-Files, https://slite.slite.page/p/PxKfPvLrLHj07O/Exporting-Your-Doc...

Recommend trying it for some personal notes/specs/etc. -- can be used independently.

obsidian: great for LLMs (local markdown files), bad for collaboration (no multiplayer features like multi editor, comments)

notion: not great for LLMs (network round trips, block-based editing), great for collaboration

I have a nontrivial config. Will share on your Issues page when I can.

If you run into any other issues -- let us know.

I find a huge missing piece in markdown is native support to color highlighting of text.

Within the OpenKnowledge app itself, right now we do support the Claude terminal embedded inside - try that out. We're looking at adding more within-app capabilities soon.

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Rant warning (sorry OP but I have to vent somehow) : AI-first is the proof that things didn't change that much. It's a bit like "Roomba-compatible" flat. If somehow you have to changes your ways for a tool to work then clearly that tool isn't that flexible. It's perfectly fine but to me it's quite tiring when it's about the most hyped industry ever funded.

Currently the CRDT is local and is used so that agents can edit the markdown concurrently with the user, and the user can edit it via the WYSWIG editor or the raw markdown editor. CRDT powers the live indicators, etc.

CRDT and git are reconciled so that git stays as the canotical version history.

re: Web app do you mean local web UI, or web hosted?

1. Webpage is lying and showing stuff what you don't have in the app

2. You made changes to my .zshrc without asking me.

3. Slow. Open and render tiny md file with 10 lines - 1s

Removed, will never install again

What functionality is most important to you re:Notion?

For Notion, we don't have a migration tool, but you can try the export to markdown approach.

Recommend trying it to get a feel, and if are looking to migrate and facing friction let me know details.

For example, with the appropriate plugins like dataview and charts, it's possible to create dashboards, lists, and tables that update automatically based on data elements present in documents or documents themselves. I use it to have views over my to-do lists (daily routine items, tasks that are overdue, upcoming tasks, etc), make dashboards, and show lists of documents edited on a particular date.

I'd love to migrate away from Obsidian towards something that's not proprietary, but I haven't seen anything that allows querying other documents.

That doesn't mean it's a design direction that open knowledge should go in, but just a data point that reducing Obsidian vaults to "just markdown" misses what some users use it for.

collab between human <> human happens using git/GitHub. so collab right now is auto-sync (~few min latency) + sharing functionality. Richer realtime collab is indeed something we're looking at.

steam machine means everyone is moving to linux.

High level general purpose "IDE" for document editing (think Google Docs, Notion), that also exposes MCP/Skills for LLM wiki/second-brain scenarios.

Seems Rowboat is more focused on the personal assistant angle, we defer to your own agent (Claude, Codex, etc.) to do the LLM work.

Re:front-matter, we do optimistic parsing of it, haven't seen any issues with it. If we detect invalid markdown we return warnings to the agent in the MCP response so it knows it needs to fix it.