Kythene vs Obsidian
Obsidian is for your notes. Kythene is for your team's.
Obsidian is a superb home for one person's notes. Backlinks and a graph view are built in, search is fast, and it's all yours on your own machine. None of that is the problem Kythene solves. Kythene is for the other thing: a whole team and the AI instances working alongside them, reading and writing each other's output against one shared memory - the version the team actually agreed on. Personal recall is one job. What your team signed off is another.
A great personal store
A vault is a folder of markdown files on your machine. You write them, you read them, you link them - backlinks and a graph view are built in. It is quick, it is yours, and for one person's knowledge it is hard to beat. Keep it.
The strain shows the moment there's more than one of you: search you have to phrase exactly, one folder tree that's always slightly wrong, no shared record of what the team actually agreed, and an AI that can't read or write any of it without plumbing.
A team's shared brain, built for its AI
Kythene is the shared memory and output layer that a whole team - and every AI instance working with them - reads and writes together over MCP. Recall finds the note that is about a thing, not just the ones that happen to share your words.
It is faceted rather than foldered, kept current rather than frozen, and it stays yours: everything exports as markdown and frontmatter that round-trips straight back to Obsidian. You own it, so you can always leave.
What changed when we moved in
Five things a vault can't do.
We moved our own vault in to see what actually changed: about 470 notes, of which 314 were real, curated knowledge - the rest were auto-generated daily logs a timeline makes redundant. Those 314 landed as 290 memories across 35 projects, duplicates merged on the way in.
What follows isn't a feature list - it's the differences we actually felt, day to day, once the vault was in.
Ask, don't hunt
Recall blends full-text and semantic search, so the note that is about what you asked surfaces even when your words don't match its words. No more guessing the exact phrase you filed it under, or scrolling past daily-log noise to reach it.
Never in the wrong folder
A note carries a project, a type, tags, and the workspace it lives in - so it's found along any of those, not filed once in a single tree that's always slightly wrong. You stop maintaining a folder hierarchy that never quite fits.
Links across a shared store
Wikilinks are first-class and backlinks stay in sync both ways - across a store the whole team writes to, not just your own vault. The graph is the team's, and links keep resolving as other people's notes move, get renamed, or are superseded.
Knowledge that moves forward
Notes carry versions, and a superseded one is deprecated with a pointer to what replaced it, so stale knowledge stops surfacing instead of sitting there looking current. Each note also records who - and which AI instance - wrote it, and is citable.
Your AI agents can use it too
The one thing a vault structurally cannot do. A whole team and their AI agents - Claude, Cursor, Codex - connect over MCP and recall and publish against the same memory. Context compounds across everyone instead of siloing on one laptop.
Side by side
Same idea - notes and knowledge. Very different job.
Not a knock on Obsidian. These are two tools built for two different things. Here is where the line falls.
| A notes vault | Kythene | |
|---|---|---|
| Finding a note | Keyword search you have to phrase exactly | Recall by meaning - full-text and semantic together |
| Organising | One folder tree; notes end up in the wrong folder | Faceted by project, type, tags and workspace |
| Links | Wikilinks and backlinks built in, across your own vault | Links and backlinks first-class, kept in sync across the team's store |
| Staying current | Old notes linger and look current | Versions, plus deprecate-with-replaced-by so stale notes stop surfacing |
| Provenance | None - a file has no author trail | Who and which AI instance wrote it, and a citable link |
| Who it's for | One person's own notes | A team - its people and their AI instances - on one layer |
| AI access | Human-edited files; needs plumbing for an AI to read or write | AI-native: instances recall and publish over MCP |
| Review and sign-off | No review workflow | Inline block-level review and approvals on shared docs |
| Ownership and leaving | Your files, but only you can use them | Full markdown and frontmatter export that round-trips to Obsidian |
| Where it lives | Local, synced per device | Hosted and reachable anywhere, including mobile - or self-hosted inside your boundary |
Keep Obsidian. Add Kythene.
If you want a fast, private home for your own notes, a vault is a lovely tool and you should keep using it. We are not trying to replace it.
Kythene is for the other half: the shared brain your team and its AI build together, that recalls by meaning, organises by facet, keeps itself current, and stays yours - markdown you can export and take back to Obsidian whenever you like. Obsidian for your personal notes; Kythene for your team's collective context.
Give your team a shared brain.
Free to start for one person, and free for the guests you invite to review. Bring your instances over MCP - and export back to markdown any time.