> You never (or rarely) write the wiki yourself — the LLM writes and maintains all of it. You're in charge of sourcing, exploration, and asking the right questions. The LLM does all the grunt work — the summarizing, cross-referencing, filing, and bookkeeping that makes a knowledge base actually useful over time.

I'm not sure how you can get any closer to "turning your thinking over to machines." These tasks may be "grunt work," but it's while doing these things that new ideas pop in, or you decide on a particular or novel way to organize or frame information. Many of my insights in my (analog? vanilla? my human-written) Obsidian vault (that I consider my "personal wiki") have been made or expanded on because I happened to see one note after another in doing the "grunt work", or just by opening one note and seeing its title right beside a previously forgotten one.

There's nothing "personal" about a knowledge base you filled by asking AI questions. It's the AI's database, you just ask it to write stuff. Learn how to learn and answer your own damn questions.

Soon pedagogy will be a piece of paper that says "Ask AI."

I hate this idea that a result is all that matters, and the quicker you can get the result the better, at any cost (mental or financial, short-term or long-term).

If we optimized showers to be 20 seconds, we'd stop having shower thoughts. I like my shower thoughts. And so too my grunt-work thoughts.

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As an aside, I'm not totally against AI writing in a personal knowledgebase. I include it at times in my own. But since I started my current obsidian vault in 2023 (now 4100 self-written notes, including maybe up to 5% Web Clipper notes), I've had a Templater (Obsidian plugin) template I wrap around anything AI-written to 'quarantine' it from my own words:

==BEGIN AI-GENERATED CONTENT==

<% tp.file.cursor(1) %>

==END AI-GENERATED CONTENT==

I've used this consistently and it's helped me keep (and develop) my own writing voice apart from any of my AI usage. It actually motivates me to write more, because I know I could always take the easy route and chunk whatever I'm thinking into the AI, but I'm choosing not to by writing it myself, with my own vocabulary, in my own voice, with my own framing. I trick myself into writing because my pride tells me I can express my knowledge better than the AI can.

I also manually copy and paste from wherever I'm using AI into my notes. Nothing automated. The friction keeps me from sliding into the happy path of turning my brain off.