Speaking as someone who has been building a business around an Obsidian plugin - I think you're on the right track.
What actually matters is that the plugin developer is pro-social, discloses the behavior, the user accepts that disclosure, and that the user isn't duped by their inability to review all of the code for every update.
For those not aware, it has basically been impossible to submit new plugins due to the manual review (and how easy/fun it is to write a plugin with AI). The developer community was becoming increasingly frustrated, and the team was burning out under the load.
So congrats to the team! This relieves a huge scaling bottleneck. It has been really cool to see how y'all build and scale.
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'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:
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
I have the same set of plugins, but additionally I also use Kanban and Templater plugin.
I'm one of the odd ones that actually use graph view now and then and it's remarkably useful if I use it in tandem with Kanban + Templater.
Templater makes sure every periodic note is linked to the closest week/day, and linked to either Kanban or an idea/issue/note (latter is manual) I worked on during that time.
Much later I can get the context of the day/week through the periodic notes, and what ideas I worked on or randomly discovered through the links. With graph view I can toggle between seeing this temporal connection or just how ideas are connected.
It gives me added context that is hard to get from a wiki-style vault, since I'm not a wiki but a human with growing (and forgetting) ideas
"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)
Thanks I'll check those out too. I don't like git for syncing though otherwise I'd have used that already.
I'm also still looking for a good search because the built in one doesn't really work well for me.
I tried the ollama one but I found the copilot plugin more full featured. However one thing I do have an issue with is that the author is trying to sell their own service. For now it still works ok with self hosted LLM though.
And Excalidraw I didn't see, I'll check that out too.
Hey kepano - can you please grandfather in existing plugin IDs?
Forcing a migration seems really user-unfriendly unless there's a symlink or something.
We have a "caution" score because our plugin (system3-relay) has a 3 in it (part of our business name), and we have thousands of daily active users that would need to essentially download a new plugin if we change it.
Yes. That's fixed! There will be some false positives and false negatives as we iron out kinks in the new system, but we're working feverishly in the #plugin-dev channel on Obsidian Discord to help devs. Please be patient, we're only a handful of people working on it :)
IMO this is an outdated view. Existing developer platforms have had to rely on static heuristics and capability-based permission systems, but now AI can run at scale and surface a lot of user-unfriendly intent that wasn't possible before.
The permission system are definitely useful for hard limits - but AI review can surface way more detail (what kinds of things are actually sent over the network, etc).
In fact, a combination of the two is likely to be even more effective. As another commenter mentioned, heuristic-based analysis can generate false positives, but that's less of a problem if it's possible to analyze these in an additional AI step.
Also worth pointing out that the N isn't too terribly large: the article says that the ecosystem has about 4000 plugins and themes? With that volume, you could almost reasonably just use static analysis to flag suspicious plugins (saving tokens), have an AI do a pre-analysis and pass to a human for final decision-making.
> I don't think Obsidian does synchronous collaboration well (could be wrong) but for asynchronous collaboration it ought to be fine.
If you want to do real-time collaboration in Obsidian there are a few plugins available. relay.md (mine), peerdraft, screengarden, and YAOS are some options.
This is really cool. I'm excited to dive into the code later today.
Im building something similar but have been working from the opposite direction.
I started by making Obsidian real time collaborative (relay.md), and have been slowly heading in the direction of yjs backed filesystem (that supports the obsidian graph "protocol").
IMO the obsidian editor is best-in-class, and the important thing is owning sync. I also wish it was open source, but I'm also impressed with their business model (100% user funded) so I'm happy to support them.
I've found that many devs starting with the infrastructure tend to hand wave conflict UX with yjs. It can be useful to support LWW in certain scenarios like updating links across many files, or frontmatter updates.
Automated find-and-replace is particularly bad in yjs/ytext because deletes are idempotent but inserts are not. race conditions trigger broken links. (I call this the "machine edits" problem, not sure if there is a better name).
I think the other underexplored discussion for local first apps is how to build a business so that you can afford to work on it full time.
The hardware feels great to hold (though the touchpad is still meh). I covered the Google logos with a glossy black vinyl Obsidian sticker.
https://notes.danielgk.com/Hardware/Travel+Laptop
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