This is the right approach. I exported my 25k Evernote notes to markdown (I'm using Emacs' Howm mode) and I use Codex CLI to ask questions about my notes. It is great and powerful!
I've been using Delta Chat with a lot of success. It is easy, it works, bots are easy and the concept is improving. They even plan to have forward secrecy. So, give it a try. If you explored it a long time ago, try again, many things have improved in that ecosystem.
I do the same with Emacs and howm-mode. My system has improved a lot since I started using Claude Code. Now I implemented all the features I missed from Evernote!
I came here to say exactly the same thing. Now the I have Claude Code and Codex CLI I just creat a folder with all the documents I need and I work from there.
The cool thing about Howm is that it's note-taking and task management for lazy people. It predates org-mode (but it also works with it nowadays) and has a distinct way of linking notes by way of go-to and come-from links, think saved search and automatic backlink respectively. Also the way tasks are displayed and surfaced is pretty neat too, the guide/manual goes more in-depth but if you find stuff like org-agenda too complex you'll appreciate Howm's way of tracking and managing tasks.
I'm not a programmer, but I need to write python and bash programs to do my work. I also have a few websites and other personal projects. Claude Code helps me implement those little projects I've been wanting to do for a very long time, but I couldn't due to the lack of coding experience and time. Now I'm doing them. Also now I can improve my emacs environment, because I can create lisp functions with ease. For me, this is the perfect tool, because now I can do those little projects I couldn't do before, making my life easier.
Strong agree. Bash is so annoying that there have been many scripts that I wanted to have, but just didn't write (did the thing manually instead) rather than go down the rabbit hole of Bash nonsense. LLMs turn this on its head. I probably have LLMs write 1-2 bash scripts a week now, that I commit to git for use now and later.
Similarly my Nix[OS] env had a ton of annoyances and updates needed that i didn't care to do. My first week of Claude saw tons of Nix improvements for my environment across my three machines (desk, server, macbook) and it's a much more rich environment.
Claude did great at Nix, something i struggled with due to lack of documentation. It was far from perfect, but it usually pointed me towards the answer that i could later refine with it. Felt magical.
Similarly I've been making Ansible Playbooks using LLMs of late, often by converting shell scripts. Play books are pretty great and easier to make idempotent than shell. But without Claude I'd forget the syntax or commands and it'd take forever to setup.
For context I'm a principal software engineer who has worked in and out of machine learning for decades (along with a bunch of tech infra, high performance scientific computing, and a bunch of hobby projects).
In the few weeks since I've started using Gemini/ChatGPT/Claude, I've
1. had it read my undergrad thesis and the paper it's based on, implementing correct pytorch code for featurization and training, along wiht some aspects of the original paper that I didn't include in my thesis. I had been waiting until retirement until taking on this task.
2. had it write a bunch of different scripts for automating tasks (typically scripting a few cloud APIs) which I then ran, cleaning up a long backlog of activities I had been putting off.
3. had it write a yahtzee game and implement a decent "pick a good move" feature . It took a few tries but then it output a fully functional PyQt5 desktop app that played the game. It beat my top score of all time in the first few plays.
4. tried to convert the yahtzee game to an android app so my son and I could play. This has continually failed on every chat agent I've tried- typically getting stuck with gradle or the android SDK. This matches my own personal experience with android.
5. had it write python and web-based g-code senders that allowed me to replace some tools I didn't like (UGS). Adding real-time vis of the toolpath and objects wasn't that hard either. Took about 10 minutes and it cleaned up a number of issues I saw with my own previous implementations (multithreading). It was stunning how quickly it can create fully capable web applications using javascript and external libraries.
6. had it implement a gcode toolpath generator for basic operations. At first I asked it to write Rust code, which turned out to be an issue (mainly because the opencascade bindings are incomplete), it generated mostly functional code but left it to me to implement the core algorithm. I asked it to switch to C++ and it spit out the correct code the first time. I spent more time getting cmake working on my system than I did writing the prompt and waiting for the code.
7. had it Write a script to extract subtitles from a movie, translate them into my language, and re-mux them back into the video. I was able to watch the movie less than an hour after having the idea- and most of that time was just customizing my prompt to get several refinements.
8. had it write a fully functional chemistry structure variational autoencoder that trains faster and more accurate than any I previously implemented.
9. various other scientific/imaging/photography related codes, like impleemnting multi-camera rectification, so I can view obscured objects head-on from two angled cameras.
With a few caveats (Android projects, Rust-based toolpath generation), I have been absolutely blown away with how effective the tools are (especially used in a agent which has terminal and file read/write capabilities). It's like having a mini-renaissance in my garage, unblocking things that would have taken me a while, or been so frustrating I'd give up.
I've also found that AI summaries in google search are often good enough that I don't click on links to pages (wikipedia, papers, tutorials etc). The more experience I get, the more limitations I see, but many of those limitations are simply due to the extraordinary level of unnecessary complexity required to do nearly anything on a modern computer (see my comments about about Android apps & gradle).
At the end of the day, all tools are made to make their users' lives easier.
I use GitHub Copilot. I recently did a vibe code hobby project for a command line tool that can display my computer's IP, hard drive, hard drive space, CPU, etc. GPT 4.1 did coding and Claude did the bug fixing.
The code it wrote worked, and I even asked it to create a PowerShell script to build the project for release
I see that nobody mentions Howm for Emacs. I find it more simple than Org-mode and its task sorting algorithm just works well for my brain. I really recommend it to those interested in a zettlekasten like note system with integrated tasks, all in text files.
