# 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.

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

Canonical page: https://hraness.com/obsidian/method


Published by @ben in profile revision 1.
Original document: https://hraness.com/obsidian/method
Original credited author: Hraness
AI-drafted at Ben Guo's direct request and credited to Hraness; every claim links to its cataloged source.

## Structured source and record data

````json
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````