Refers to handing note-taking over to AI without much critical thought. Coined off "vibe coding." It isn't a term anyone actually uses — I made it up.
Vibe Noting
With the LLM Wiki going viral, there's a movement to solve everything in Obsidian with a single click. Honestly, I don't quite see why it's catching on like this. It also seems like plenty of people are trying to cash in on the "LLM Wiki" keyword — much the way plenty of people cashed in on "vibe coding" after Andrej Karpathy made that keyword go viral.
The message that you shouldn't hand the important things over to AI is getting stale too. And yet this post is going to deliver exactly that message. I said something similar in a newsletter a few years back. (The One Skill You Must Never Outsource to AI – Summarizing) Back then, the way you used AI was to pull up ChatGPT in a browser and go through a back-and-forth one question at a time. When coding, for instance, you'd ask the AI about one feature or one bug at a time.
But these days, AI agents like Claude Code and Codex have made large-scale parallel work possible. The patterns of AI use have clearly changed as well. Once large-scale parallel work became possible, you could get work done without looking closely at the specific results or the process. That's when vibe coding became possible. And so did what I'm going to call vibe noting.
A slightly different point of criticism than with vibe coding
The critique of vibe noting comes at things differently from the critique of vibe coding. With vibe coding, the first-order objection is that the thing might not work. The main concern is guarding against "oh, it seems to be running nicely? LGTM!" Even if it looks like it works for now, edge cases are hard to catch, and so on. Of course, the point isn't that we shouldn't use vibe coding — there's plenty of talk about shoring up this part and using it anyway.
Beyond that, the second-order objection concerns learning on the part of the person doing the vibe coding. This one causes problems for developing a developer's capabilities.
In the case of vibe noting, the first-order objection doesn't really apply, because a note has no notion of "working." Which means it's mainly tied to the second-order objection to vibe coding: the critique from the standpoint of learning. (To be written later.)