My love of learning has stayed with me since childhood. Not as an obligation, but as one of the activities I enjoy most: discovering new connections, questioning old assumptions, linking things that used to sit apart.
A few years ago, during the Covid pandemic, I took an online course on learning (the so-called Roam Book Club #3) and came across Niklas Luhmann's Zettelkasten through it – the card-index system he used for decades to build his scholarly work. The idea caught me immediately: not collecting knowledge, but networking it.
Out of that international course, a circle of international friends who share my passion for learning has formed over many years. We meet online several times a month and exchange ideas on topics like learning, knowledge management, mental models, and increasingly artificial intelligence.
A few months ago, I started an experiment: bringing all the notes I had gathered over decades into one coherent system, modeled on Luhmann, with the help of AI. I still call the result a Zettelkasten, even though it has drifted far from Luhmann's physical card index by now – it has become my own, AI-supported variant.
AI now takes on the role of maintaining this growing knowledge network, linking it, and keeping it accessible – a task that would be nearly impossible to do by hand. Much of it is still unfinished or could be improved, and here and there certainly not free of errors either – and that's fine: the Zettelkasten isn't a finished work but a place I keep returning to myself, to remember something or discover something new.
I'm also working with newer concepts such as Andrej Karpathy's idea of an "LLM Wiki," as well as agentically pulling in external sources – for instance by automatically feeding in two wonderful channels on geopolitics and AI (both in English), House of El and House of El AI, whose content the AI reads and, where relevant, folds into the Zettelkasten.
The published Zettelkasten currently holds around 1,950 interlinked notes, available in both German and English.
I work with two software systems here: Claude by Anthropic as the AI, and Obsidian for note management. I've also published this Zettelkasten for anyone interested.