The Karpathy LLM Wiki tweet got me thinking about how I’d actually want to structure this for myself. Everyone is hyping up the Claude and Obsidian combo, but I wanted to shake things up because I saw a couple of other mentions of Recall and Notion. I put them to the test, and this is what I learned. His point was that the raw substrate matters more than the prompting, and that landed. So I spent the last month running roughly the same workload, around 200 sources (articles, PDFs, YouTube transcripts, a few research papers), through three different setups, with Claude as the reasoning layer on top of each. (Is anyone else testing a different AI model for this? I thought it was kind of ironic that Andrej started a whole trend for Claude.) Claude + Obsidian Setup: Obsidian vault with the sources captured as notes, Smart Connections plugin for semantic search, Claude accessed via the API for Q&A. Where it wins: total control. Local-first, so sensitive sources are fine. The vault is yours forever, no platform risk. When Claude answers a question, you can immediately jump to the underlying note and read it in context. Where it breaks: Parsing a PDF into clean markdown is on you. Tagging is on you. Claude is only as good as the structure you put in, and after 200 sources my own filing discipline started slipping. The semantic search via plugins is decent but it’s clearly bolted on rather than designed in. Verdict: best if you’re already an Obsidian power user and your sources are mostly text you’ve already curated. Worst if you’re trying to ingest a lot of messy external material fast. Claude + Recall Setup: throw URLs, PDFs, YouTube videos at Recal, an AI knowledge base… It parses, summarizes, tags, and connects everything into a graph automatically. Claude queries across the graph natively. Where it wins: Using the browser extension to save content is truly amazing.The best part is they have a mobile app where I can also share content. I don’t have to be sitting at my computer, so I’m capturing things both at home and on the go. The summaries are accurate and readable. The organization is automatic, and it is looking good for now. I also really like the front end. Where it breaks: cloud-only. If your sources are proprietary or under NDA, this is a hard stop. Graph started getting a little messy, but it looks like I can manually unlink things. I guess it’s a trade-off in Obsidian. I’ve spent a lot of time manually making links here, and now I’m spending a lot of time removing links. Verdict: best if you Want an out-of-the-box, no-code solution that’s easy to maintain and It works really well with online sources, YouTube videos, podcasts, and PDFs, but it also has a pretty nice note taker. Worst if local is non-negotiable. Claude + Notion Setup: Notion database with each source as an entry, properties for tags and relations, Notion AI for in-app summaries, Claude via API for deeper Q&A across the database. Where it wins: if Notion is already your operating system (I’m not fully committed to Notion. I just have been accumulating a bunch of random things there over the years, so it was actually nice coming back to it.) The database queries are powerful for filtering and views. Notion AI is fine for one-off summaries on a single page. Where it breaks: Notion is built for documents, not for a research substrate. The auto-linking between entries is weak unless you manually set up relations. Claude over the Notion API works but the retrieval feels shallow because the underlying structure is page-shaped, not chunk-shaped. Cross-database reasoning is where this setup falls down hardest. Verdict: best if you want one tool for everything and Notion is already where your team lives. Worst if you want genuinely deep cross-source reasoning I cannot tell you that I picked one yet because I haven’t. Basically, all I’ve learned is that I’m not sold on the cord and Obsidian setup, and I’m having fun playing with the other two.Has anyone else tried anything else besides the Claude and Obsidian flow? submitted by /u/PRABHAT_CHOUBEY
Originally posted by u/PRABHAT_CHOUBEY on r/ArtificialInteligence