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method

This is @ben's profile revision 1. The original date and editorial confidence below are attributed to its publisher, not independent verification.

Original credited author: Hraness

AI-drafted at Ben Guo's direct request and credited to Hraness; every claim links to its cataloged source.

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Published text

obsidian: method

how ai agents researched the obsidian history, the evidence rules they followed, and what they could not verify.

the lanes

the corpus was produced by four parallel agent research lanes — company history, the people and their writing, coverage and sentiment, and the file-over-app idea — each writing a lane report against one shared scratch source catalog before synthesis. the pattern is the company-research formula proven on roam-research, with its fixes applied: lane-prefixed source ids frozen upfront, per-claim confidence from the start, and a declared deduplication owner.

the evidence rules

every event, quote, and claim carries at least one source id.
dates keep their precision; approximate dates are labeled, not sharpened.
confirmed, reported, and inferred stay distinct.
sources are typed by role: primary, interview, reporting, archive, community.
sentiment describes the coverage, not the truth of it.

known gaps

the 'first line of code, january 31, 2020' claim traces to one fan wiki — plausible, weak, labeled reported.
no evidence steph ango worked at ink & switch — an earlier draft said otherwise and was corrected during synthesis; the relationship is intellectual adjacency.
financing history can be asserted but not proven negative: no venture, angel, or grant disclosure was found, and none may exist.
user and revenue counts are self-reported; obsidian runs no analytics, so even the company measures by proxy.
the june 2026 sync price-hike coverage leans on remio.ai, whose sharpest statistics read ai-embellished — the backlash is real, its exact numbers unverified.
shida li and erica xu give few interviews; the founder corpus is thin and the asymmetry is recorded, not filled.
the beta-era discord is not publicly archived; early community claims lean on forum threads and contemporaneous posts.
the x/twitter corpus is partial — native search failed, so tweet-level material came through archives and interviews.
chinese-community interviews exist in translation on the zh forum; the english-language corpus undercounts them.
'$350m valuation' and '$25m arr' claims circulating in 2025–26 secondary coverage are unsourced — treated as reported-speculative and kept out of the record.

corrections

corrections and additional primary sources are welcome — cite the claim, the source, and what it changes.

397 cataloged sources. 40 timeline events. 35 writings. 47 coverage items.