Liberté, Égalité, and Standardization of Recurring Tasks!

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Liberté, Égalité, and Standardization of Recurring Tasks!<br>One knowledge worker’s slop is another’s PKMS liberation.

Jeff Moore<br>Aug 22, 2026

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The traditionalist magistrates of productivity discussion spaces across the internet are holding some kind of line that some of us have already crossed, if not erased. Their wrists ache from carpal tunnel as they lower their bifocals down their noses and squint at their screens, all cluttered with community moderator tools that they may once have wielded toward more liberating, enlightened conversation.<br>“There shall be no discussion of vibe coded tools here, except perhaps in monthly self-promotion threads that command enough of our respect that we haven’t bothered to update their titles from six months ago.”<br>They are like the Thermidoreans of the French Revolution who turned their backs on enlightened ideals to take a more conservative posture. We can even accuse them (sort of like “J’accuse!”, if only because it’s French) of embracing the methods of the Ancien Régime that preceded and necessitated the revolution in the first place, though we must do so with some gratitude for a much, much lower body count.<br>I’ve always been a productivity software hobbyist. I didn’t expect vibe coding to make me a PKMS counter-counter-revolutionary, but I guess it does.<br>I read David Allen’s Getting Things Done when it came out in 2001, and actually got something out of the spiritual follow up, Making It All Work.<br>I was the first person I knew with a Palm Treo, and tried to get things done (and, when I had a Droid Whatever in 2009, tried to make it all work).<br>I loved Nozbe.<br>Todoist entered the conversation and, if I remember correctly, didn’t even do recurring tasks in its early days. (I might be wrong about that, but it was the kind of thing that happened.)<br>And, Evernote was a true sandbox. The muse that danced above its developers was one of helping you work rather than deciding how you should work.<br>Hell. I almost bought the Evernote messenger bag. I look back on it like my grandfather looked back on some Chevy Whatever for which he pined in the 1950s. It was cool and all Jetsons-y at the time, but let’s be honest. It’s objectively and timelessly ugly.<br>After the Evernote bubble burst, I spent the next 15 years being dissatisfied with powerful and capable apps that I loved, each for a hot minute before feeling like I was being boxed into a corner.<br>And don’t even get me started on Obsidian. After jumping in early and toying with it for years, I finally realized that I needed to step away from the on-again-off-again dysfunctional relationship I was having with Mr. Markdown. No matter how many plugins I installed or even wrote, I just couldn’t get Obsidian to change for me.<br>(Oh, how I lied to myself! How much time I wasted!)<br>I also have to admit that I had a fling with Emacs. I’m not proud of it, but I’ve learned that I can’t hide from my past.<br>After all of that, I even tried to use a (gasp!) Traveler’s Notebook with an actual pen full of actual ink. I moved to notebooks from Japan that had whisper-thin paper. I came out of this analog phase with a favorite pen. It’s a satisfyingly heavy and fidgety copper Karas Kustoms monster that now sits largely unused because I’m back to digital.<br>But when I met Claude Code, when I first laid eyes on him, I was immediately smitten.<br>Like, I’ve-never-felt-this-way-about-any-app-before smitten.<br>No longer a productivity gigolo, I’m now in deep partnership with AI to vibe code everything I need. It started with simple scripts and plugins, evolved into strange and clunky Electron apps, and turned toward much more robust and comprehensive platforms, like a fully block-based PKM web app that conjures images of Obsidian and Capacities having an illegitimate FOSS baby (with Ollama serving as the midwife) and a fiction-writing platform that categorizes your characters into archetypes, analyzes your writing style against a growing list of mentor texts, and produces a fully-formatted manuscript for submission.<br>Oh, and, yeah, you can use it to actually map and write that unfinished opus that you started for NaNoWriMo, and which has been nagging at you ever since that whole movement collapsed.<br>An aside: there’s no upsell in my sharing those links. The tools are open source and yours to fork/install/whatever. But, I learned the hard way that “gift” or “seeking feedback” means “self-promotion” to those PKMS Thermidoreans.<br>Disagreeing proved … pointless.<br>Whatever anyone thinks of the tools I’ve made, they’re mine. I’m not renting them. I’m not subscribing to them. I’m not buying into someone else’s vision of how 21st-century knowledge work should happen.<br>I’m at the helm.<br>So, vibe coding. “Vive la révolution!”<br>But, my project and your project and everyone else’s projects … it could all be slop, unless we can make something of it all together. And here’s where I have to have some...