Key takeaways
Jackywine (@Jackywine) recaps a month of handing his local Obsidian vault to a Grok Bot now named “Jackywine Digital Garden” (formerly “Obsidian Apprentice”; https://x.ai/bot/gdq_d-d9OCnnREs3VwGdV). A read-only diagnosis on Sept 17 found ~5,488 markdown files, nearly 40% empty stubs in the root, and ~8,000 unresolved links — the illness he named “collecting disguised as thinking.” He set four guardrails: file over app, AI output only into AI outputs/, atomic flomo imports, and sparse properties. In October he instituted a “content iron rule” (don’t write what you haven’t lived), stopped a stripped wikilink pack and an idle daily linking report, and wrote apprentice rules. On Nov 6 he renamed and split roles (flomo as memory, Obsidian as disk), walked onboarding one question at a time, wired up obsidian-cli, re-diagnosed (5,661 notes; unresolved links down to 4,747; stubs still ~43%), shipped an evergreen-note skill, and open-sourced jackywine-digital-garden-skills (7 skills, MIT). Thesis: a bot’s strength is that it can act; his most valuable decisions were what he forbade it to do. Judgment stays human. The article includes diagnosis, onboarding, apprentice, evergreen-note, related-notes, and orphan-notes prompts.
