CLI for Your Notes in The Archive – Automated Zettelkasten (Usage) for Programmers

Recently on a meetup, I was asked whether the age of manual note-taking and Zettelkasten is over now that LLM’s are everywhere and can produce so much text in such a short time that humans can’t outcompete them anymore. Outcompeting a computer on producing text was never the goal, of course. A Zettelkasten is a tool for thought. You use it to develop ideas and work on hard problems for long periods of time. One outcome of using a Zettelkasten is, or can be, to write more articles or books. In other words, “producing text” – although that reduction loses all nuance and meaning, and on that account, an LLM would indeed be superior. Manual note-taking and curation of interests, ideas, of developing new material to work with – all that is still part of my personal daily routine even though on some days I hardly type a line of code by hand. I did type a lot of code by hand in the past, though. And instead of copy-pasting code snippets and looking for past learnings in my note archive (aka…