TL;DR

A decade of notes locked in OneNote, then a switch to Markdown files I thought was about portability. It turned out to be about something bigger: Markdown's combination of plaintext, embedded metadata, and explicit relationships makes it the right substrate for AI agents to work with your knowledge. The cloud tools with the beautiful interfaces made a bet that didn't pay off. The boring file-on-disk approach did.

I was a Microsoft OneNote user for a long time. More than ten years. I could not even begin to count how many notes I had built up in that time — meeting notes, project research, code snippets, random ideas. A decade of thinking, captured in a proprietary format on Microsoft's servers.

As a developer, I knew there was a principle about managing data well: keep content and configuration in the same file. Keep it portable. Don't let your tools hold your data hostage. I knew this principle. I applied it in code. And then I ignored it completely for my own notes, for over a decade.

I eventually made the switch — to Markdown files, and specifically to Obsidian. What surprised me was the timing. I moved before the current AI wave hit. I wasn't chasing a trend. I was just finally acting on something I already believed.

What I didn't anticipate was how right the decision would turn out to be, and for reasons that had nothing to do with personal productivity and everything to do with how AI agents actually work.

Continue.. https://pablooliva.de/the-closing-window/obsidian-and-markdown-in-the-ai-agent-era/