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Comment by smokel | Hacker News Reader

I've written an Obsidian clone for myself, which has proper Emacs keybindings. Took me a few hours too many to get in all the features that I need.

What I find interesting is that I have little motivation to open source it. Making it usable for others requires a substantial amount of time, which would otherwise be just a fraction of the development time.

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I was thinking about doing the same. Build a clone with AI custom tailored for my own quirks. And not bothering to open source it because it's too bespoke for anyone else. How hard was this? Can you share any advice?

It turned out to be pretty hard in some places. I'm using CodeMirror as the basic building block, which is great, but it does not support WYSIWYG table editing out of the box. Getting that to work requires one to use a separate CodeMirror instance for the cell editor, which makes things rather complicated. For the LLM as well :)

I think I've spent ~20 hours and a couple of $100 of Claude Opus tokens in Cursor. So it's not cheaper or easier, but the amount of frustration saved with having proper Emacs keybindings might delay catastrophic global warming by a few days.

Oh, and of course I'm not compatible with all the Obsidian extensions, nor do I have proper hosting for server-side sync yet. All in all, a fool's errand, but I'm having fun.

Thank you! Re extensions: my thinking was that if you build a clone, then extensions become irrelevant. Just build what you need directly into the software. Extensions systems always seemed to me to be a second class citizen. I think I read an old story of Linus Torvalds using an old fork of microemacs and whenever he disliked something he would just go tweak it's C code (e.g. key bindings). I'm kind of thinking that but done with an LLM. Software could in theory be smaller and more bespoke. And it you want it to work differently, you just prompt an LLM to change the actual source code. Then you don't need higher level configuration/cuatomization interfaces. Simpler software.

This is an interesting topic. I always loved the idea of extensions, for multiple reasons. But they do have their disadvantages, and I'm eager to find out how extension systems will hold up in the time of LLMs.

A major advantage of (certain) extension mechanisms is that you can update them in real-time. For example, in Emacs you can change functions without losing the current state of the application. In Processing or live coding environments, you can even update functions that affect real-time animation or audio.

Another advantage is that they can pose a very nice API, that allows for other people to learn an abstraction of the core application. If you are the sole developer, and if you can spend the time to keep an active memory of the core application, this does not help much. But it can certainly help others to build upon your foundation. Gimp and Emacs are great examples of this.

A disadvantage is that you have to keep supporting the extension mechanism, or otherwise extensions will break. That makes an ecosystem somewhat more slow to adapt. Emacs is the prime example here. We're still stuck with single-threaded text mode :)

Im doing the exact same thing but Im building my Obsidian clone with Rust and gpui and primarily with Codex. So far I estimate Ive been solely vibe coding it for ~15 hours now with only one small change made by hand. Id be interested in comparing notes/our different approaches to this. Feel free to shoot me an email at jerlendds at osintbuddy dot com if you want to chat.

I have a small demo video of yesterdays work here: https://github.com/jerlendds/mdi

Theres since been many additions, Ill update the video tonight

I have a theory (and I'm sure I am far from the first one to voice it) that the number of useful open source projects released to the public will be on the decline now that anyone scratch their own itch with a few hours of vibe coding. Why would I spend hours evaluating a dozen different note-taking applications and _maybe_ find one that is _kinda close_ to what I want, if I can instead have Claude vibe me one up _exactly_ the way I want it?

(I actually did write my own note-taking application, but that was before LLMs were any good at writing code.)

Because when it eventually and inevitably corrupts your data, you won't know what to do or have any recourse?

Surely any sane person vibe coding a note taking app just has it save all the notes as markdown files to disk? At that point making a backup is trivial and they're unlikely to get corrupted.

So why vibe code a version of a thing that already exists in a dozen different permutations, and with actual eyes on the codebase?

In a typical open source project only one person has had a look at a particular piece of code. Only in the larger and more mature projects do people actually spend time reviewing code. Also, if you don't pay for the free code, there is often no serious recourse to recover your data either.

As stated in my first comment, Obsidian does not support Emacs keybindings properly, nor is it open source. Writing an extension to add Emacs keybindings is not at all trivial, because you have to work around a lot of existing and undocumented functionality.

There are other reasons for not vibe coding your own alternative, but as LLMs keep progressing, these reasons may become less relevant.

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