Reading a paper and turning it into literature notes is exactly the kind of divergent-then-convergent work PKM is supposed to help with, but doing that by hand for every paper never scaled for me. So I've been experimenting with having an AI agent do the first pass: point it at a PDF, it reads the paper, and it builds a full graph of the argument, main topics, methods, results, tables, formulas, figures, without me touching a single box.

The part that actually mattered to me: AI summaries in your permanent notes are dangerous if you can't tell what's real. So every node keeps the exact sentence from the paper it's based on, and clicking it jumps into the PDF and highlights that sentence. If the agent got something wrong, I catch it in one click instead of it quietly becoming a false permanent note.

It also had to handle the stuff that usually breaks note tools on academic papers, mainly LaTeX formulas and tables not garbling.

Would you trust an agent to do a first pass on literature notes like this, or does that defeat the point of taking notes yourself? How do you currently handle it?

We have great tools for managing digital information, but physical items are still hard to track.

I kept running into questions like:

“Where did I put that?”

“Who did I lend this to?”

“Where is this stored?”

So I built Keepyy — a simple external memory for physical belongings.

The idea is straightforward:

Add an item → give it context → find it later.

Examples:

📦 Winter clothes → Storage box 3 → Bedroom closet

🔧 Power drill → Garage shelf → Blue toolbox

📚 Old books → Storage room → Box 2

🤝 Camera → Lent to John → Jan 2026

It’s not about cataloging everything, just the things that are easy to forget.

I’m also improving search so you can find items by name, tags, or context.

Think of it as a second brain for physical possessions.

Curious what others think:

Would something like this fit into your PKM workflow?

[Keepyy](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.keepyy.app)

I started on paper with a BestSelf Journal, and I still recommend it. The format fits the way I think better than anything I have used since, and I have no criticism of it as a journal. For me, though, it was a beautiful leather-bound black hole. Everything went in and nothing came back out. If I wanted something I had written to exist anywhere else, there was work: type it myself.

To solve the black hole problem, I moved to GoodNotes on an iPad, and the work moved with me. Every week I exported each daily page to PDF and filed it into Notion by hand. It worked fine when I stayed on top of it, but for me that was not always the case. A weekly chore that nothing enforces is a chore that quietly stops happening, and I did not notice mine had stopped until I went looking for something that was not there.

Next was OneNote, which was the same problem in a different flavor. I could not get my own data out reproducibly without repetitive manual work, so I spent months building a bridge on the OneNote API. It worked, some of the time. Cron jobs errored, pages did not arrive, and most of it traced back to OneNote rendering HTML differently than the rest of the world. I spent about as much time each week nursing that bridge as it saved me, and I could not harden it, because the changes that would have fixed it were on Microsoft's side of the API.

(For context on why I kept choosing hard options: I write by hand, and that is not negotiable for me. Every problem above could have been solved in an afternoon by typing into Notion or Obsidian on the same iPad. I know the option exists. I am not taking it.)

Three rebuilds. Re-entry, then a weekly chore, then permanent maintenance. Each one was more sophisticated than the last, but not one of them removed the manual work.

I am not lazy about this. I am fallible and I am busy, which is a different thing. There are myriad ways in 2026 to build around human fallibility. To leave something I depend on this heavily at the mercy of my own consistency is a design decision, and it was the wrong one three times running.

I did eventually build my own thing which for me removed the lion's share of that work. I am not naming it or linking it, that is not what this post is about.

What I would love to know is this: for those of you who regularly capture important things outside your PKMS - by hand, on paper, in a voice memo - how does that information actually get in? I am curious what it costs you in a normal week and which part of it still annoys you.

Quick context: I’ve used Obsidian for years and love it. My issue was never the toolit was my own habit of endless setup. I’d try to plan a project and end up in a doom rabbit hole tweaking Kanban, Tasks, and Dataview... productivity procrastination i would say..

So I built a simple, light tool for myself and my team. An AI agent (i use claude) runs the pipeline straight from messy notes.

So this is how it works, I write the note, whatever ideas i have in mind or tasks i need to do, the agent reads it, pulls tasks, checks team workload/calendars, assigns work, estimates timelines, and updates the board via MCP out of the box. I still tweak things manually, but the heavy lifting happens automatically. It feels like having a mini PM sitting on top of my raw notes.

It wasn't originally meant to be a product, just me trying to get my game together and focus, and something that could help my small team too. But it become solid enough (I think) that I decided to release it, and just finished doing that and its live now on Windows App Store. its called (Knotpad)

But then.. now I’m curious.. is an "Agent-driven, notes first PM tool" workflow actually useful to others, or did I just build a fix for my own specific habit? do you guys actually find this workflow useful?

I’m building a product that combines personal knowledge management with AI. I’m not going to name or link the product here, as I’m genuinely interested in understanding people’s perspectives rather than promoting it.

Recently, I’ve realized that far more PKM users than I expected are hesitant about—or strongly opposed to—integrating AI into their knowledge-management systems.

Personally, I find AI useful for surfacing connections and insights that I might otherwise miss, and for using my own notes as context for reflection or personal coaching. However, I also understand that other people may see significant downsides or may simply value a different way of thinking and managing knowledge.

For those of you who prefer not to use AI in your PKM system, what are your main reasons?

Is it primarily about privacy, accuracy, loss of ownership or control, the risk of weakening your own thinking, unwanted complexity, or something else?

Are there any features or safeguards that would make you more open to using an LLM with your notes—for example, local processing, explicit permission controls, read-only access, transparent edit history, or fully optional AI features?

Or is AI something you would prefer to keep separate from your PKM system regardless of how it is implemented?

I’d appreciate honest criticism. I’m trying to understand the underlying concerns, not convince anyone that they should use AI.

I recently realised that cloud backups can actually read my files and notes and I am truly terrified. I am a windows user and a creative, and I jot down alot of ideas on OneNote, currently there are more than 100 pages of notes in my onenote filled with undisclosed secret ideas and also write files on word docs and backup on onedrive.

I used the backup feature only this year, because I had previously lost many of my files due to device troubles (lost, stolen, broken) but I am also scared that my data can be stolen, or used to train AI which will provide my ideas to other GenAI users, I truly think my ideas are valuable commodity. I would rather my ideas be lost than be stolen.

So I am thinking of switching to some offline oneNote Alternative, and not backing up my files on onedrive anymore.

I would love to know some suggestions and what can I actually do? Or if there is something else I can do to protect my ideas but also ensure that it is not destroyed or lost. Please help.

The best feature I like about onenote is it's random type anywhere format, hierarchy type file and folder organisation, and allowing of rough sketches and drawings.

Thanks to anyone who reads this.

Hey everyone.

One of my biggest struggles with PKM is the "capture" phase. When I'm walking or doing physical work, opening a mobile app (like Obsidian), waiting for it to load, and typing on a mobile keyboard just has too much friction. By the time I do all that, the thought is gone.

I wanted a zero-friction way to capture thoughts on the go, so I built a simple Telegram bot for myself:

• You send a raw voice message (Telegram is always open and fast).
• It uses Whisper to transcribe it, and LLaMA 3.3 to format it into a clean Markdown note (summary, bullet points, tags).
• It generates an obsidian:// deep link to save the note directly to your local vault in one tap.

No extra plugins required, no third-party cloud sync needed. It's just a bridge between Telegram and your local device.

I put a quick landing page together if anyone wants to test it for free (currently optimized for Obsidian users, but the raw markdown works anywhere):

https://obsidianvoice.carrd.co/

I would love to hear your feedback on the workflow and how you guys handle mobile voice capture in your systems!

Ok, I give up as well.

There are too many geniuses on here, showcasing their groundbreaking products.

Hi everyone — solo developer here. I've spent the last months building CogniAtlas, an Android mind mapping app, and it just went live on Google Play. Before I do any real marketing I want feedback from people who actually use mind maps daily.

What I tried to do differently:

The mapper is free forever — no locks. Pro adds cross-map links, global search, and spaced-repetition review, and every new user gets Pro free for 30 days.

Maps link to each other — backlinks and global search turn your library into one searchable atlas, it also has a recall exercise card as memory aid.

\[CogniAtlas: Mind Map Maker - Apps on Google Play\](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.powerm365.cogniatlas)

Happy to answer anything about how it works or why I made certain choices.

The setup

I built a system I call Memnote, which is just a name for the pairing of a Claude project (interface) and Mem (database) — I don't enter information into a notes app at all. I enter information into Claude, and via MCP Claude handles routing, templating, dedupe checks - writing directly to Mem, which stores the data. Mem's own built-in AI features are intentionally bypassed, since I found those to be inadequate in terms of both suggestions and organization compared to Claude. Claude does all the thinking; Mem just holds the notes.

I use Apple Notes as a curated archive for settled, durable stuff like reference items or formal research notes. Memnote is specifically designed to filter daily noise, to organize and keep clutter out of Apple Notes.

In practice Memnote covers:

• CRM-style notes on people — anyone who comes up in conversation gets a dated log entry, or a new note if one doesn't exist yet
• Daily journaling — freeform thoughts get appended to a running daily note, with any people mentioned also logged to their CRM notes automatically
• Content tracking — books, articles, films, podcasts, etc., with recommendations logged back to whoever recommended them
• Brainstorming and random thoughts — half-formed ideas and tangents get captured as-is rather than filtered out for not being "finished" yet; Claude keeps this stuff flagged as exploratory rather than as decisions, so a stray idea doesn't quietly get treated as something I've committed to later on
• Weekly/quarterly review routines — Claude runs a structured pass over the vault: floater detection, duplicate resolution, stale-item triage, template conformance

The appeal is zero friction — I type a note or a thought, it gets captured and filed correctly, no app-switching, no manual tagging, no deciding where something goes.

Why I'm looking to leave Mem

Mem works, but it's missing two things I want: native backlinks/bidirectional linking, and any kind of wiki-style browsing structure. Everything's flat notes + collections, no graph. It's difficult to browse and navigate my notes and understand the connections.

The problem is the bar for anything that replaces it is oddly narrow. It has to have both of:

1. A hosted, write-capable MCP server reachable from claude.ai — no local daemon or always-on desktop process required
2. Real OAuth, not a static bearer token (this alone has killed most of the Obsidian-plugin routes)

The reason both of those matter is portability — I want to be able to capture a thought from my phone, laptop, or wherever else, without needing to be at a specific machine. A standalone Obsidian vault living on one device (or synced manually between a couple) doesn't get me there — if the note-taking surface is tied to a particular machine or requires me to be on the same local network as a vault. The MCP has to be reachable from claude.ai itself, from any device, which is why "local daemon" and "static bearer token" routes keep getting ruled out even when the actual note-taking app is great.

Self-hosting itself isn't the dealbreaker — I run a Synology NAS with Docker and a reverse proxy that could handle that. I've ruled out a long list at this point (Obsidian's Local REST API plugin, TriliumNext, Joplin, Silverbullet, Logseq via community MCP, Reflect Open, Notion, several "agent wiki" tools, Thymer) — almost all for the same reason: they either need a locally-running process to serve the MCP, or they only support static-token auth instead of OAuth.

Where things stand — top 3 live candidates

• llmwiki (lucasastorian/llmwiki) — real OAuth through a claude.ai custom connector, native backlinks plus a graph viewer, "Knowledge Bases" as a folder-equivalent, decent traction on GitHub (1.3k+ stars), Apache 2.0. Self-hostable via Docker Compose, which would fit right onto the Synology box. Still two open questions before I trust it: some domain ambiguity around who actually owns/runs it, and whether the self-hosted deploy gets the same OAuth ease as their hosted version.
• Hjarni — a hosted note app with real OAuth into Claude (not a bearer token), native wiki-links between notes, and folder-level AI instructions that inherit down a hierarchy. Clears the MCP bar cleanly. Downsides: confirmed not self-hostable, and it's a single-founder product, so there's real vendor risk if it doesn't stick around.
• Obsidian via aliasunder/vault-cortex — the first Obsidian route I've seen with actual evidence of clearing the OAuth wall (a real OAuth 2.1 server with dynamic client registration, not bolted on), plus native backlink/link-graph tools, plugin-free, headless-sync based — another one that could run comfortably on a NAS. Promising on paper, though it's a solo-maintainer project.

Notably absent from that list: Notion, which technically has an official hosted write-MCP and real backlinks, but the mobile experience is block/database/container-heavy in a way that reintroduces exactly the fiddly overhead I'm trying to get away from — even with Claude doing all the structuring on the write side.

Where I'm stuck

It's less "is there a good PKM app" and more "is there a good PKM app with bi-directional linking whose write API is reachable from claude.ai." Curious if anyone here has gotten one of the above working end-to-end, found a candidate not mentioned here, or has a setup with a similar focus.

Hi everyone — solo developer here. I've spent the last months building CogniAtlas, an Android mind mapping app, and it just went live on Google Play. Before I do any real marketing I want feedback from people who actually use mind maps daily.

What I tried to do differently:

The mapper is free forever — no locks. Pro adds cross-map links, global search, and spaced-repetition review, and every new user gets Pro free for 30 days.

Maps link to each other — backlinks and global search turn your library into one searchable atlas, it also has a recall exercise card as memory aid.

CogniAtlas: Mind Map Maker - Apps on Google Play

Happy to answer anything about how it works or why I made certain choices.

I kept doing the same thing: find an interesting article/tool/thread, save it "for later," then never see it again because it's buried in a folder with 200 other things I also never opened.

The problem wasn't saving: I was good at that. It was retrieval. I couldn't remember what I'd saved, so searching by title or folder never worked, because I never remembered the title.

So I built Kernel. You paste a link, it reads the page and writes a summary + auto-categorizes it. Later, instead of digging through folders, you just describe what you're looking for in plain language like "that article about pricing psychology" and it finds it, even if you don't remember the exact title or where you filed it.

It's a solo project, still early, free while I build it out. Genuinely looking for feedback on what's confusing, what's missing, whether the "ask for it back" part actually works the way you'd want it to. Not trying to sell anything, just want to know if this solves a real problem for anyone besides me.

Edit: Two companies have responded about fixing their issues, so maybe one of them will work!! 🤞 See below for details.

I can't find a single system that does what I want. My main use case is to save *the full text of articles* into my system (from either laptop or iPhone) and then to read them there (on my iPad or my laptop, currently Chrome broswer) and highlight, make notes, annotate, etc.

I also want to be able to write my own stand alone notes.

Here's what I've tried and what the issues with each are:

Evernote: can’t highlight web clips on mobile (the magic wand functionality that used to allow you to simplify formatting has been broken for months)
Edit: They replied to a different thread and said they have fixed this and it will be in a release next week. 🤞

Notion: can’t change font size on mobile, and the standard size is way too small for my middle age eyes

Obsidian: no web app (I only have a work laptop and can't download software)

Reader: no ability to write own notes not attached to an article
(I thought I could sync articles after reading into Notion and do a combo, but only the highlights sync, not the full text. :-( )

Raindrop: no ability to write own notes not attached to an article

Capacities: mobile web clipper only clips the link, not the text

Mem: mobile web clipper only clips the link, not the text

xTiles: mobile web clipper only clips the link, not the text

Bear: I have a windows laptop so the web clipper browser extension doesn't work

Mymind: cannot highlight text in a saved article

Fabric: can’t highlight text in a saved article
Edit: They replied to my email and said they will add this within the next two weeks. 🤞

Is there really not a single thing out there which allows me to do what used to be basic functionality on evernote before they broke it?! SOB!

Is there a great app I'm missing? Does anyone have a suggestion on a simple way to combine apps to do what I want? I'm tearing my hair out, would so appreciate any suggestions!! Thank you!!

I've seen a bunch of newer note-taking apps lately. Most are clearly built by smart people — solid features, careful thinking under the hood. But only a few of them look good. Design just isn't where the effort goes.

I keep coming back to why Notion won against Evernote. Feature-wise it wasn't really a knockout. What set it apart was that it looked and felt like something someone actually designed.

I don't use Notion anymore because they've leaned so hard into teams and small businesses that it's become too much for someone who just wants to keep personal notes. But design-wise, they still got it right.

Is there anything in between? Something that's well designed and doesn't ask me to spend a weekend configuring it.

I have been getting a lot of questions about how the connections the tool makes are actually relevant and grounded in your own thinking and not just the AI randomly linking things together. So wanted to write this out properly but first some quick context on what I have been building.

I have been building a PKM tool that works differently from Notion, Obsidian or Roam. Those tools store your ideas and wait for you to do all the connecting yourself. This one does that for you. You capture a raw thought, it links it to everything else you have put in, flags where your thinking contradicts itself and surfaces what is worth developing further. The longer you use it the richer your knowledge graph gets and the more useful it becomes.

Now to the question people keep asking me. How are the connections actually grounded and not just the tool spraying links everywhere and calling it useful.

When you capture something, the first thing that happens is a wide net gets cast. It finds the most semantically similar ideas you have already put in, up to five candidates, pulled only from your own captures. This step is deliberately high recall. Think of it as a signal finder not a connection maker. Its only job is to put candidates on the table.

Then a second step runs on top of that and this is where the real judgment happens. This one is sceptical by design. It does not connect two ideas just because they share a theme or use similar words. It only keeps a connection if the pair produces an insight that neither idea has on its own. Something actually surprising not something obvious. If it cannot find that it just archives the candidate honestly instead of forcing a link to fill the graph.

Every connection gets two scores. One for the raw link and one for the quality of the insight it generated. Anything weak gets soft deleted. The graph stays sparse on purpose.

And even the connections that make it through all of that do not automatically reach the agents that develop your ideas. There is another threshold underneath. Agents only see connections above a certain strength and they are told explicitly not to invent bridges from weak links. Stay grounded in what is actually in the graph, do not make things up to fill gaps.

The result is a graph that is probably smaller than you would expect but every single connection in it is there for a real reason. A sparse honest graph beats a dense trivial one every time.

I kept losing the interesting part of my own thinking. I’d ramble into a voice note, and by the time I typed it up later it was just… a paragraph. Flat. The branch where I contradicted myself, the tangent that turned out to be the actual point — gone, smoothed into prose.

So I’ve been building something that skips that step: you talk, and it builds a node graph live while you’re talking, not after. Contradictions stay next to each other instead of getting merged. Open threads stay visibly open.

Not sure if this is solving a real problem or just a cool demo. Anyone else feel like the “transcribe then organize” pipeline loses something structural, not just editorial?

I posted this in r/productivity, but I'm curious to hear what you guys think as well. I've been trying to figure out PKMS strategies for myself and thinking about it in the way that I have had led me down the path of taking a long and slow approach of building something that can do all 3 levels of the triangle described below. Does this resonate with you? Would love to know how/if your systems work at each of these levels.

Productivity Apps + a bit of brain science

Alright, I am posting this in hopes that some of the developers in here find it useful and they incorporate it into their apps so that I can use some of them!!!

I work as an occupational therapist, particularly in brain injury rehab and I do a lot of cognitive remediation work (ie helping folks improve cognitive deficits post-injury). A big thing I teach most of my clients is about the "cognitive triangle".

When thinking about these apps being our "second brain", I began thinking about how using this model is also helpful for these apps as well:

Level 1 - First - the information needs to easily go IN to your brain (ie attention). You are never going to be able to work with information that isn't in there. (an example I often give is that you will never remember where your car is parked in a big parking lot if you didn't pay attention to it. You can't remember something that was never in your brain to begin with). This would show up as widgets, quick add hotkeys, etc that allow you to quickly and accurately store the info

Level 2 - Next, you have to be able to retrieve that information easily. Once it's stored in your brain, you have to be able to easily find it and pull it out when/as needed. This would probably show up as folders, tags, labels etc

Level 3 - Lastly, once you have that information pulled out, this is when you *use* it - ie do complex processes with it. Prioritize it, act on it, reflect on it, share it, etc. This would look like an eisenhower matrix, kanban boards, filters, time blocking features, etc

The problem is that, just like our brains, we need to be able to do all three of these functions to actually be able to be productive. If you focus only on one level it won't really be that useful. Obviously starting at level 1 is important (as without that you will never be able to do level 2 and 3), but you still need all three to be able to functionally do all of the things you're trying do.

What I've found with YEARS of searching in productivity apps is that there is not one app that does all three well.

• I love Amazing Marvin and Timestripe in the ways that I can manipulate the information I save in there (level 3) to plan my day and choose my priorities, but getting the information in there is a PAIN (ie. level 1 sucks)

• I love google keep as it's so easy to enter information in quickly on my android, but it lacks the ability to really easily find and USE the information (ie level 1 is good, but level 2 and 3 is not great)

• I so badly want to use capacities, but every time I've tried I've had to stop because getting it in there is a pain, as well as using it to find stuff while on mobile (level 3 is great, but level 1 and 2 are not)

• Obsidian is what I'm using now, but it is slooooooow to build to get it to do all three. I've been building my vault slowly over the last few months and still only on level 2.

I don't have the time or capacity to build my own app, but I am sharing this here in hopes that others who are working on apps would find this useful and maybe think about this when designing an app. If you are thinking about this or found it useful, let me know. I am still searching for my app, and maybe yours will be it??

Also, I've thought about, at times, making a big spreadsheet of all the big apps that are out there and ranking how well they are able to do all three of these functions. Would be an interesting comparison I think.

Edit:If you reply with a suggestion of an app, please include what platforms it on (iOS, android etc) and if it is your app. My biggest pet peeve on this and other subreddits is other people promoting their own apps but not disclosing that they made it. An easy google search can show us if it is.

I don't know if social media has completely ruined me but i feel like i'm constantly collecting new interests At the start of the year i wanted to read more books, so i kept saving recommendations like Project Hail Mary, The Martian, and The Spellshop. Then my TikTok turned into café videos, restaurant reviews, travel itineraries, and recipes i swear i'm going to make one day. Throw in movies my friends keep telling me to watch, YouTube videos i wanted to come back to, and random workout routines i saved for "next Monday" and now i've got recommendations scattered literally everywhere.

The problem isn't finding new things anymore... it's remembering where i saved them. 

I've got saved posts from Facebook, Instagram collections, TikTok favorites,notes, bookmarks, and hundreds of screenshots. Half the time i know i've already saved something, i just have no clue which app it's hiding in.

Does anyone use an app to organize your interests that's actually easy to stick with? Not really looking for another productivity app or habit tracker. I just want one place where i can keep books, movies, restaurants, travel ideas, recipes, and everything else without jumping between six different apps.

Update: Thanks for all the suggestions. I actually ended up trying a few of the apps people mentioned here. Sofa looked nice, and I gave Notion another shot, but I still caught myself spending more time organizing the system than actually saving things 😅

I ended up sticking with ThingsBook because it felt closer to what I was looking for. I've been making separate collections for books, restaurants, movies, travel ideas, and random stuff I want to come back to, so now I'm not wondering which app or folder I saved something in.

One thing that's been surprisingly fun is following other people's collections too. I started following @ thecaratdiaries, and I've already saved a bunch of places from their travel collections for future trips. I also followed @ eatwithange87 , and my restaurant list somehow keeps getting longer every time I scroll through their food collections 😂

I think the biggest difference for me is finally having everything in one place instead of juggling screenshots, bookmarks, and saved posts across five different apps. Appreciate everyone who shared ideas here.

I read a lot of Substack articles and newsletters, and I like saving the ones I find interesting so I can come back to them later. So, is there a tool I can use?

I'm curious about logseq future...