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  "path": "/posts/2026/04/cli-for-your-notes-zettelkasten-usage-for-programmers/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-04-28T13:33:57.000Z",
  "site": "https://christiantietze.de",
  "tags": [
    "my own note-taking app, The Archive",
    "Check out the Swift CLI called ta (for “The Archive”) on Codeberg.",
    "from the GitHub mirror",
    "shared a couple of experiments on our forums",
    "subscribe",
    "What I'm up to right now",
    "Work with me",
    "Apps"
  ],
  "textContent": "Recently on a meetup, I was asked whether the age of manual note-taking and Zettelkasten is over now that LLM’s are everywhere and can produce so much text in such a short time that humans can’t outcompete them anymore.\n\n**Outcompeting a computer on producing text was never the goal, of course.**\n\nA Zettelkasten is a _tool for thought_. You use it to develop ideas and work on hard problems for long periods of time. One outcome of using a Zettelkasten is, or can be, to write more articles or books. In other words, “producing text” – although that reduction loses all nuance and meaning, and on that account, an LLM would indeed be superior.\n\nManual note-taking and curation of interests, ideas, of developing new material to work with – all that is still part of my personal daily routine even though on some days I hardly type a line of code by hand. I _did_ type a lot of code by hand in the past, though. And instead of copy-pasting code snippets and looking for past learnings in my note archive (aka ‘vault’ for the kids :)) I can ask a clanker to do the research for me.\n\nAn LLM is great at augmented retrieval and searching for synonyms. And at retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). So I basically use a home-made approach to that.\n\n## `ta`: a CLI to Search in a Zettelkasten\n\nMy Zettelkasten is the source of truth; my personal knowledge database, scratchpad, my workshop containing all my tools and projects.\n\nAn LLM can be taught to use that efficiently (`grep` and `find` are nice and all, but traveling the note graph can be expressed more cleanly and with fewer tokens wasted) and for that goal I specified and then had “made to order” a custom CLI for my needs.\n\nI’m using my own note-taking app, The Archive, to do all Zettelkasten work. Most links between notes are identifiers-only, like `[[202604201238]]`, instead of full filename or title. Hashtags are used, too, and full-text search is the main interaction with everything, including link navigaiton. Replicating a read-only command-line interface to that note-archive wasn’t hard.\n\nCheck out the Swift CLI called ta (for “The Archive”) on Codeberg.\n\nYou can download binary releases there or from the GitHub mirror.\n\nI shared a couple of experiments on our forums if you’re curious and want to follow along.\n\nIn short, the `SKILL.md` approach for searching and traversing my Zettelkasten produced interesting results with GPT-5.4 high thinking using the `pi` agent harness; Claude was less willing to go into details on its own with the same prompt.\n\nIf you’re using _The Archive_ , you might enjoy the CLI as well: the point is that it’s easy enough to teach the agent harnesses how to find stuff from your notes.\n\nRecent months have seen a rekindled interests in personal wikis in the LLM user space thanks to Andrej Karpathy sharing how a plain text wiki is good enough and you don’t need RAG and vector databases, just progressive summarization.\n\nWell, with a Zettelkasten you already have all of this, but curated by a human with taste and intent. So that’s something the automatic wiki ingestion tools can’t offer.\n\nAnd everyone thought that I’m overselling the value of a Zettelkasten, ha!\n\n* * *\n\n_Get new posts delivered to your inbox — subscribe._\n\nWhat I'm up to right now · Work with me · Apps",
  "title": "CLI for Your Notes in The Archive – Automated Zettelkasten (Usage) for Programmers",
  "updatedAt": "2026-04-28T13:33:57.000Z"
}