Exploring the current state of knowledge management tools, productivity apps, and my personal setup using Cursor, Obsidian, and other tools in the age of primitive LLMs.
The best knowledge editor does not need itself. We are at such a mid-phase in the development of knowledge management tools that the minute you subscribe to another seemingly note-taking app, you are already left behind yourself.
What matters is, hence, the system to which your intellect, and systemic organizational, as in that of an individual, can easily adapt. It was Microsoft Word, and Excel, and PowerPoint for many people. Majority of these individuals still do not understand that Google offers the same, and even better package, and do really not get why they’re subscribing to that thing called cloud, yes, on the brink of neocloud at the stairs of Hyperscalar Future.
Since people are ready to dunk on others, and rage bait feeble memes, even for fun, on timelines, for this or that incentive, socially and financially, wow such a sentence, the mid in the above meme is usually misunderstood when it comes to anything from note-taking (for the average mind) to lifelogging (well, again for the average). Over time, some of these products have turned into fullstack gardens anyway with their own quirks, and except for the Microsoft Notes there, which I had to use during my teaching career and graduate studentship for they were complimentary in the “package”, I am still using these. Yes, I do use Roam Research, Anki, Obsidian, Google Workspace, Proton Suite, Notion, and for the bookmarking, I use Raindrop, and used to use all that jazz including Omnivore, Pocket, Instapaper, Pinboard. Yes, I tried, loqseq, Bear, Simplenote, and the like, too.
However, these productivity tools, unless imposed on a professional setting, are utterly personal, and most of the time, people are pushed to use them because of the interactions they have. Client A is active on Notion whereas B works with a combination of Google Drive and Zoom Workspace because we now have the AI note-taking assistant who also prepare highlights, transcriptions etc. with cloud recording.
If you are a solo generalists, entrepreneur or builder, it’d be wise to find niché talent networks where you can get vouchers for these since you just cannot unzip this “abundance” of “productivity” hack gardens into simplicity and, no, unless you are just vibing, mere adaption of Apple Notes does not do anything, though you can vibe with it during Japanese classes with Apple Pencil. No, setting up an Apple ecosystem, which I like, productivity suite requires as much minimalistic input as setting up a 37Signals personal production pipeline with Basecamp, Hey and the rest, all of which I like, too.
Upon all of these, we also have politicization of the “chat” and “forum”-like collective spaces, among which X Premium+ might be the only one that deserves it. Yes, I do think like this, as Farcaster ID 2282, once a daily active user, as a Telegram premium user who also “needs” Discord Nitro for Northern American AI and crypto-economics related, some ZK-gated Telegram chats for the decentralized network state cohorts, and Matrix chat protocol applications for only a few products with their own culture, and a few dozen privacy-first-but-acquhired-by-behemoths chat and e-mail applications, and many such stories as well. It has come to a point that the most meaningful de-Googling has become adapting Google en masse for my workspace procedures. I don’t complain though, for I do enjoy this type of product-hopping, which informs my UX and UI tinkering during consultations and for my private “memex” stack.
I am not Gwern enough, or a random engineer who has through the decades founded up their own dedicated-server pipeline with all the snapshot, storage, data hoarding, bookmarking extensions ready to port anytime with enough backups here and there if not in the outer space right now—but I do wish to be able to rent my own hyperscaling outer space data rack in at least the orbit one day, which seems to be near enough, in fact so, close that we’ll possibly have datacenters in the space faster than portable nuclear reactors in the backyard.
My current knowledge set up runs around tweaked IDEs and the vanilla terminal. I use Cursor Pro+ alongside Bugbot at the max, and I also have the plus or pro tiers of Claude Code, ChatGPT (still getting used to Codex), Gemini.
Having brewed my morning coffee, I usually open up Cursor and set up a) an auto agentic chat window, and a terminal, side by side on an 13 inch Macbook Pro M1 2020 (configured to the fullest).
Here there are two workflows:
My daily note-taking process, similar to a zettelkasten method, and as close as possibly to the block-based app approach in Roam Research, which I still use for “offline” stream-of-consciousness away from any agentic pipeline, for I do enjoy being spatially able to navigate my mind-space and reflect it into the universal plaintext language with a minimal UI that is also not a Vim or Neovim approach, or emacs. But I do emulate the process there by natural-language inputs in the chat and I have the agents back it up in a few Obsidian vaults, for it offers the most composable plaintext, file-over-app, approach with all the canvases, databases, and plain linear notes as well.
My daily “vibe-hacking” or “coding” as in “vibecoding” plane where I experiment on startup ideas across many a discipline and domain, and now, thanks to in IDE prototyping, I seem to need only the Cursor pipeline with these workspaces as “addons” themselves. Yes, I know, I can build this with proper Mac Studio racks, or a fully configured M4/ M5 with opens source models running locally via Ollama and the gang with some Exo setup. But I still delay those and when I do that believe me I’ll be running my own enterprise that is not another note-taking app.
So, basically, this is my pipeline nowadays.
If you have read it so far, thank you, it’s because I’ve been ruminating over this on X and only the HackMD guys like those.
Published on December 27, 2025 by Gökhan Turhan
Exploring the current state of knowledge management tools, productivity apps, and my personal setup using Cursor, Obsidian, and other tools in the age of primitive LLMs.
The best knowledge editor does not need itself. We are at such a mid-phase in the development of knowledge management tools that the minute you subscribe to another seemingly note-taking app, you are already left behind yourself.
What matters is, hence, the system to which your intellect, and systemic organizational, as in that of an individual, can easily adapt. It was Microsoft Word, and Excel, and PowerPoint for many people. Majority of these individuals still do not understand that Google offers the same, and even better package, and do really not get why they’re subscribing to that thing called cloud, yes, on the brink of neocloud at the stairs of Hyperscalar Future.
Since people are ready to dunk on others, and rage bait feeble memes, even for fun, on timelines, for this or that incentive, socially and financially, wow such a sentence, the mid in the above meme is usually misunderstood when it comes to anything from note-taking (for the average mind) to lifelogging (well, again for the average). Over time, some of these products have turned into fullstack gardens anyway with their own quirks, and except for the Microsoft Notes there, which I had to use during my teaching career and graduate studentship for they were complimentary in the “package”, I am still using these. Yes, I do use Roam Research, Anki, Obsidian, Google Workspace, Proton Suite, Notion, and for the bookmarking, I use Raindrop, and used to use all that jazz including Omnivore, Pocket, Instapaper, Pinboard. Yes, I tried, loqseq, Bear, Simplenote, and the like, too.
However, these productivity tools, unless imposed on a professional setting, are utterly personal, and most of the time, people are pushed to use them because of the interactions they have. Client A is active on Notion whereas B works with a combination of Google Drive and Zoom Workspace because we now have the AI note-taking assistant who also prepare highlights, transcriptions etc. with cloud recording.
If you are a solo generalists, entrepreneur or builder, it’d be wise to find niché talent networks where you can get vouchers for these since you just cannot unzip this “abundance” of “productivity” hack gardens into simplicity and, no, unless you are just vibing, mere adaption of Apple Notes does not do anything, though you can vibe with it during Japanese classes with Apple Pencil. No, setting up an Apple ecosystem, which I like, productivity suite requires as much minimalistic input as setting up a 37Signals personal production pipeline with Basecamp, Hey and the rest, all of which I like, too.
Upon all of these, we also have politicization of the “chat” and “forum”-like collective spaces, among which X Premium+ might be the only one that deserves it. Yes, I do think like this, as Farcaster ID 2282, once a daily active user, as a Telegram premium user who also “needs” Discord Nitro for Northern American AI and crypto-economics related, some ZK-gated Telegram chats for the decentralized network state cohorts, and Matrix chat protocol applications for only a few products with their own culture, and a few dozen privacy-first-but-acquhired-by-behemoths chat and e-mail applications, and many such stories as well. It has come to a point that the most meaningful de-Googling has become adapting Google en masse for my workspace procedures. I don’t complain though, for I do enjoy this type of product-hopping, which informs my UX and UI tinkering during consultations and for my private “memex” stack.
I am not Gwern enough, or a random engineer who has through the decades founded up their own dedicated-server pipeline with all the snapshot, storage, data hoarding, bookmarking extensions ready to port anytime with enough backups here and there if not in the outer space right now—but I do wish to be able to rent my own hyperscaling outer space data rack in at least the orbit one day, which seems to be near enough, in fact so, close that we’ll possibly have datacenters in the space faster than portable nuclear reactors in the backyard.
My current knowledge set up runs around tweaked IDEs and the vanilla terminal. I use Cursor Pro+ alongside Bugbot at the max, and I also have the plus or pro tiers of Claude Code, ChatGPT (still getting used to Codex), Gemini.
Having brewed my morning coffee, I usually open up Cursor and set up a) an auto agentic chat window, and a terminal, side by side on an 13 inch Macbook Pro M1 2020 (configured to the fullest).
Here there are two workflows:
My daily note-taking process, similar to a zettelkasten method, and as close as possibly to the block-based app approach in Roam Research, which I still use for “offline” stream-of-consciousness away from any agentic pipeline, for I do enjoy being spatially able to navigate my mind-space and reflect it into the universal plaintext language with a minimal UI that is also not a Vim or Neovim approach, or emacs. But I do emulate the process there by natural-language inputs in the chat and I have the agents back it up in a few Obsidian vaults, for it offers the most composable plaintext, file-over-app, approach with all the canvases, databases, and plain linear notes as well.
My daily “vibe-hacking” or “coding” as in “vibecoding” plane where I experiment on startup ideas across many a discipline and domain, and now, thanks to in IDE prototyping, I seem to need only the Cursor pipeline with these workspaces as “addons” themselves. Yes, I know, I can build this with proper Mac Studio racks, or a fully configured M4/ M5 with opens source models running locally via Ollama and the gang with some Exo setup. But I still delay those and when I do that believe me I’ll be running my own enterprise that is not another note-taking app.
So, basically, this is my pipeline nowadays.
If you have read it so far, thank you, it’s because I’ve been ruminating over this on X and only the HackMD guys like those.
Published on December 27, 2025 by Gökhan Turhan
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