Refers to handing off note-taking to AI without much critical scrutiny. The term is modeled on vibe coding. It isn't an established term. I made it up.
Vibe Noting
Thanks to the LLM Wiki viral moment, there's a growing push to solve everything in Obsidian with a single click. Honestly, I don't quite see why it went so viral. I suspect a lot of people are trying to cash in on the LLM Wiki keyword. After all, once Andrej Karpathy made the term vibe coding go viral, plenty of people made a killing off it.
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 mentioned something similar in a newsletter a few years ago. (The Ability You Must Never Outsource to AI: Summarizing) Back then, we used AI by opening ChatGPT in a browser and going back and forth one question at a time. When coding, for example, you 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, we could do the work without looking closely at the specific results or the process. That's when vibe coding became possible. And it's also when the vibe noting I'm naming here became possible.
A Slightly Different Point of Criticism from Vibe Coding
The criticism of vibe noting takes a different approach from the criticism of vibe coding. The primary point in criticizing vibe coding is that it may not actually work. The main concern is guarding against "Oh, it runs nicely? LGTM!" Even if something seems 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. Many people argue that we should use it while compensating for this weakness.
The secondary point of criticism is about the learning of the person doing the vibe coding. This causes problems for the development of a developer's skills.
In the case of vibe noting, the primary criticism doesn't really apply, because notes have no concept of "working." So it is mostly tied to the secondary criticism of vibe coding, the one from a learning perspective. (To be written later)