I tried Claude’s code, VS code and native LLM as a note taking application and only one worked.

Reminder apps have a habit of promising you organization and then giving you back the actual organization anyway. Obsidian gives you free storage and leaves every folder and link to you. The idea is a bit different because it has a template for everything, but I lost a whole weekend trying to fix them before I wrote a single line for them. Even Windows Notepad now displays Markdown, so there’s no shortage of space for notes.

Additionally, Claude Code, VS Code, and LM Studio are open on my computer almost every day. They are not designed as notes or readers, but each can read a folder of text files as well as any note-taking application. This made me wonder if any of them could work better than a dedicated writing app. These are very different tools, so there’s no standardized way to test them as note takers, so I’ve tried to bend each of them into a note application in some sense.

Claude Code with Obsidian Mastery

A single rules file does most of the work

Claude’s code is an Anthropic agent that runs directly inside a folder on your computer. This is for code, but the Obsidian repository is actually just a folder of text files, so it can read and write notes without any special setup. I’ve added Obsidian’s official skillset, published by Obsidian CEO Steph Ango, so agents write notes that Obsidian wants, meaning wikilinks and properties instead of generic Markdown. After that, I had them write a short rules file for storage so that anything starting with “note:” would go into today’s daily entry, and from there it would go into a file, be linked, and nothing would be allowed to be deleted or moved.

Before I wrote these rules, she went through my folders and found them to fit the daily writing format, not on her own. After that, you need one line to capture the new record. I can give him any half-baked idea and it turns into a daily post in seconds, plus he links to other old posts anywhere. Linking is something I tend to skip in Obsidian because it can be very tedious, so having it quickly as part of a quick note capture is ideal. When I ask Claude to add related posts, he adds links to each one with a short reason, and also shows old links to posts that no longer exist.

He writes a little more than you asked. One of my sentences came back with a comment and suggestion that I never did, so if it’s not something you’re really interested in, please show it in the .md file.

Native LLM with MCP file system

Offline notation sounds great on paper

LM Studio can connect local templates to MCP servers, and the file system server provides template tools to read and edit files in folders you approve. I mostly run it on my RTX 3070 at Q4_K_M with Qwen 3.5 9B, which only has 8GB of VRAM (the 4B is also my choice for quick notes and document work). The appeal is simple: your entire workflow remains native and you still get the AI ​​thinking layer on top.

Although you get the system guide, there is no rules file to rely on, so whatever I want to do for my records, they have to be in my queries themselves. When I wanted to add a new header line to the end of one of my posts, his first reaction was to guess how the file ended, and he got it wrong. But it read the file again and then fixed it – however, when I tried to link two related files, the same thing happened. Search is where I struggle the most. I asked anything about onboarding and it just matched the file names instead of the content, which was very frustrating.

I’ve been using this MCP file system for a while now and it’s served me well so far, and I think it’s probably because I have too much content in my stash to mix it up. It handles smaller directories fine, but just this one small demo with over 20k of my 30k context windows in use. So, this is limited to what you can run on your computer, which means it may not be suitable for large recordsets.

VS Code doubles as a notes application

This is the editor

VS Code isn’t primarily a writing tool, but it is a text editor, which means it can easily be built into a writing tool. It doesn’t matter if your folder is full of notes or code, it will handle it the same way either way. Also, I didn’t add any AI here and just used the raw editor.

Finding things in my pockets is the best. Ctrl + P will quickly retrieve any entry from any part of its name, and searching the entire repository will list every entry that matches the keyword. For reading, it has an edited preview, so you don’t have to read the raw syntax directly. Also, source control (Git) is great for records – if you change just one number or letter, it highlights the change.

Taking notes is another story. There is no quick capture or daily note function, so a new note means creating a new file that needs to be named and sorted. Wikilinks are also displayed as plain text. So it’s a bit of a give and take with VS Code.

All of them are good for shooting, but only one is good for organization

I thought VS Code would come out on top here because it behaves like the writing app of the three. It’s still my go-to place to read and dig up notes. The native model has privacy, but it’s out of context before the end of the day. And so the crown passes to Claude Code. It takes extra steps to produce an editor artifact with formatting options, so it makes me feel a little disconnected from my writing, where I had to rely on warnings in the first place. But nothing matches its admin features, and a notes tool that makes the organizing part easy is one you’ll stick with.