Obsidian — The Second Brain Didn’t Work

Sept. 4/26

I dropped Obsidian last week. That sentence would have surprised me a year ago — I'd built half my note-taking identity around that app, the graph view, the backlinks, the promise that if I just kept adding notes the connections would eventually show themselves like roots finding water. They never quite did. Not for lack of trying.

Obsidian sells itself as a second brain, and I bought the pitch the way you buy a variety at the seed catalog because the photo looks good — full color, promising yield, no mention of how it does in your particular ground. The trouble wasn't the app itself. Plain text files, local storage, no lock-in — all of that is sound thinking, the kind of thing a person who's been burned by a platform disappearing learns to value. The trouble was the learning curve, and more than that, the maintenance. Every note wanted tending. Every link wanted checking. It started to feel less like a garden and more like a field I'd let get away from me — too many rows, not enough hours, weeds where the ideas should have been.

I've farmed long enough to know when a piece of ground isn't paying for the work you're putting into it. Twenty-seven years teaches you that walking away from a bad investment isn't failure, it's just arithmetic. You don't keep watering something that isn't going to produce. So I made the call, which was harder than it should have been, because I'd told myself a story about who I was as a note-taker, and giving that up felt like giving up the identity along with the app.

Craft is where I landed, and the reason wasn't features, exactly. It was fit. It sits easily next to the rest of what I already run — Ulysses for the actual writing, the Mac Studio and the MacBook Pro talking to each other over Universal Control like two hands on the same tool. Craft didn't ask me to rebuild a system. It slid into the one I had. That's a different kind of value than the graph view ever offered — not the promise of an emergent brain, just one less thing fighting me every morning.

The part that actually tipped it, though, was that Craft has an MCP for Claude now. I can read from it and write to it directly, which means the notes stop being a separate room I have to walk into and start being part of the same conversation I'm already having when I sit down to draft. That's the whole game with tools, in my experience — not whether they're clever, but whether they get out of the way. A good irrigation line doesn't announce itself. It just runs water where the water needs to go, and you stop thinking about the pipe.

I don't know yet what Craft will look like a year from now in my workflow, whether it earns a permanent row or turns out to be another variety that looked better in the catalog than it grew in the ground. But I know what Obsidian taught me, even in leaving it: a second brain isn't a piece of software. It's the discipline of actually using whatever you've got, consistently, instead of building an increasingly elaborate shrine to the idea of organization. The tool that wins isn't the one with the most features. It's the one still standing in the row six months from now, doing its quiet work, while you're busy thinking about something else entirely.

From the Field:

Six Colors — sixcolors.com

Daring Fireball — daringfireball.net

Consumer Reports (Tech) — consumerreports.org 

For deeper dives: MacSparky (paid membership) — macsparky.com 

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