In the new Claude-Code powered world, my choice to have stuck with Obsidian as a notetaking app (painfully migrated from Evernote many years back) has gotten vindicated. I see friends who are trying to install MCPs of Notion and continue to pay subscription to Notion, or MCPs of Roam, which does a piss-poor job of navigating their Roam graph, while with Obsidian you do not need any plugin, API or MCP at all. Obsidian is afterall just a codebase full of markdown files, you can let Claude Code lose into it - the filesystem is the API, plaintext is the format.

Steph Ango (@kepano) is a designer, entrepreneur, and the CEO of Obsidian. In this episode, we discussed his journey from creating Winamp skins to leading Obsidian, and the fundamental patterns and inclinations that drive everything he explores and makes. We discussed Obsidian on multiple different dimensions, his deluxe chocolate chip cookie recipe, his exploration through furniture design, and his default inclination to push “too far” into anything he is exploring. Steph Ango demo'd the design process of several furniture projects he’s been working on at home as well as a custom piano learning app he created to teach himself music theory. This is a conversation about craftsmanship, pursuing a deep understanding, and what that reveals about who we are. The Other Stuff is hosted by @internetvin — filmmaker, entrepreneur, and possibly the most curious man on Earth. Produced by New. The Other Stuff #28 — Kepano: The Interconnectedness of Everything — Timestamps 00:03:55 Origin of Kepano 00:10:34 Relationship with Computers 00:15:25 Online Communities & Video Games 00:30:47 Winamp Skins 00:40:04 Uniformity in Design 00:51:05 Obsidian 00:59:20 Bidirectional Linking, And The Relationship Between Everything 01:23:18 Obsidian Sync, Publish, and Bases 01:32:06 Why File Over App 01:43:15 The Deluxe Chocolate Chip Cookie Taste Test 01:49:48 Living Fully 02:09:50 Early Project Walkthrough 02:19:03 Furniture Design Walkthrough 02:49:00 Constraint and Patterns 02:58:47 Kepiano 03:13:00 The Future of AI and Startups 03:31:10 Closing