IMO Obsidian is currently the king of "personal software frameworks". You can look at YT channels for inspiration of what other people are doing, but I'd avoid trying to copy someone else's setup (for the vague promise of productivity), and instead just start to tinker and tailor your environment to yourself. The base experience is really good. What matters most is that you spend time actually writing useful things down.

For personal use - Obsidian + AI (claude code / codex) + self-authored plugins is the best AI experience available. Folks like Karpathy have been writing a bit about LLM-powered wikis and context management. That seems to be causing a big wave of interest at the moment.

What I see from our business customers is all about AI in a collaborative context. The more advanced customers are typically developing an in-house plugin for their agent so they can make setup really easy, centralize token tracking, and aggregate learnings (while respecting employee privacy/customization). We also see strong interest in the privacy/security aspect from red teams (trying to track the huge influx of vulnerabilities).

IMO the practices for using Obsidian effectively in a work environment are under-represented on YT and in tutorials (we have done some light consulting in this area).

(I'm the developer of Relay / https://relay.md )

I'd recommend adding plugins one by one, either to solve a problem or as an isolated experiment, to ensure you fully understand what each does. I can vouch for each of these:

BRAT, Datacore, Dataview, Editor Syntax Highlight, Excalidraw, Hotkey Helper, Image in Editor, Minimal Theme Settings, Omnisearch, Outliner, Periodic Notes, QuickAdd, Readwise Official, Recent Files, Relay, Style Settings, Tag Wrangler, TaskNotes, Templater

HTH!

i made an Obsidian plugin to search and embed blocks with ^block-references (aka ^block-ids) if that sounds handy for you:

https://github.com/tyler-dot-earth/obsidian-blockreffer

I got a few plugins recommended here: https://github.com/BryanHogan/obsidian-vault-template#recomm...

So:

- FolderNotes

- Filename Heading Sync

- LanguageTool Integration

- Periodic Notes

Trying to keep the amount of community plugins as low as possible. Why I use each one of these I explain in that section, or in more detail on my post about my Obsidian Vault setup: https://bryanhogan.com/blog/obsidian-vault

"Ink" for drawing (big miss in the standard feature set IMO, the only one thing I missed coming from OneNote which is horrible in every other way compared to Obsidian).

"Self-Hosted Livesync" for syncing on your own server (I don't want my stuff on other people's computers even when encrypted)

"Copilot" for AI integration (I use two local ollama servers as you might have guessed from the above :) )

"Whisper" for text to speech/dictation (Yes I host that locally too)

"ReadItLater" for easy web clipping/archiving

Smart Connections for related notes surface/embeddings

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