Obsidian’s local, Markdown-based vaults make notes readily accessible to AI agents, but the author argues that AI-generated summaries, tags, links, and organization can weaken a personal knowledge system. Long generated summaries can make it difficult to distinguish a writer’s own ideas from AI text and add noise to later searches. The author sometimes uses Obsidian Web Clipper to create one- or two-sentence summaries, but labels them as AI-generated and removes them after adding personal writing. The author recommends AI primarily for retrieval and research, including finding related notes, vector search, similarity search, clustering, and search across large collections. Obsidian’s CLI can return files, search, and perform actions faster than grepping files when used with coding agents. The author’s single vault contains 25,979 files totaling 3.5 GB and uses the Omnisearch plugin to find material quickly; Obsidian Smart Connections can add vector and similarity search. Sensitive notes create an additional reason to prefer local models over uploads to external services. The author contends that manually writing and linking notes is part of learning and idea formation, while automated connections may produce a knowledge graph that does not reflect the user’s thinking. AI-generated material can instead be isolated in a dedicated PARA-method folder or separate vault, potentially excluded from search. The author also argues that human-curated knowledge remains valuable for both personal learning and future AI training.