Knowledge Work PRs

Edit, Merge, & Update

I’ve been pretty vocal about my Obsidian being the engine behind this blog. It’s how I process my readings and observations into coherent ideas.

And a few weeks ago, I shared my Obsidian setup with all of you.

In that post, I mentioned how I’m slowly adding in different plugins that are helping me strengthen my knowledge graph and link together as much context as possible.

I stand by the fact that these plugins are awesome. But! They require more effort than I had expected. For example, the simple note review plugin is great for surfacing older notes, but I still have to manually go through them and write new context. Same problem with the copilot plugin…I have to go and have a chat with it daily, which takes up more mental bandwidth than I’d like.

I simply don’t have the patience for that. It’s just not how my brain works. I’m always thinking about what the next thing I need to learn or write is. The funny part is I fully acknowledge that strengthening older notes will actually help me a ton with future blog posts but it’s unfortunately a habit that’s not sticking.

So what’s the plan?

I’m going to automate 90% of the process by setting up an agent to ingest my daily commonplace notes and prompt me with:

1. A list of notes to update

2. A draft of suggested additions

3. Potential new links for old notes

My job will be to simply review the suggested changes and hit submit. Then the agent will go and update my Obsidian accordingly.

For those of you that are familiar with software terminology, I’m basically having the agent create a PR (pull requests) for me that I can review, edit, and merge.

An example PR may look like this:

I know that, at least initially, many of the suggested changes will probably be meh. But the point is that even these mid suggestions are better than me doing nothing at all! For example, if my agent gives me potential changes in four different files and I only accept one of them… that’s still one atomic note that got stronger. And if these small changes happen daily, the progress starts adding up quickly.

Having agents create knowledge work PRs helps narrow the scope of my job to one simple task: add as much context as I can to my daily commonplace notes.

I’m going to set this up asap, will keep you all posted.