Refers to handing off note-taking to AI without any real critical review. The term is derived from vibe coding. It isn't a term actually in use; I made it up.
Vibe Noting
Thanks to the LLM Wiki hype, there seems to be a movement to solve everything in Obsidian with a single click. Honestly, I don't quite understand why it's gone this viral. I suspect a lot of people are trying to cash in on the LLM Wiki keyword. After Andrej Karpathy made the term vibe coding go viral, plenty of people made a killing off vibe coding, after all.
The message that you shouldn't hand important things over to AI is also getting stale. Even so, I'm going to deliver that message in this piece. I made a similar point in a newsletter a few years ago. (An Ability You Must Never Outsource to AI: Summarizing) Back then, we used AI by opening ChatGPT in the browser and going back and forth one question at a time. When coding, for example, I would ask the AI about one desired feature or one bug at a time.
These days, though, AI agents like Claude Code and Codex make large-scale parallel work possible. The way we use AI has clearly changed. Once large-scale parallel work became possible, it became possible to do work without looking closely at the specific results or the process. That is when vibe coding became possible. And so did the vibe noting I'm about to name.
A Slightly Different Point of Critique from Vibe Coding
The critique of vibe noting approaches the problem differently from the critique of vibe coding. The primary point in criticizing vibe coding is that it might not work. The main thing to guard against is "Oh, it seems to be running nicely? LGTM!" Even if something appears to work for now, edge cases are hard to find, and so on. Of course, that doesn't mean we shouldn't use vibe coding; there are many arguments for using it while compensating for this weakness.
The secondary point of critique is the learning problem of the person doing the vibe coding. This causes problems for developing a developer's skills.
In the case of vibe noting, the primary critique doesn't really apply. A note has no concept of working or not working. So it mostly relates to the secondary critique of vibe coding: the critique from a learning perspective. (To be written later)