r/surfmind

I use AI pretty often while learning, researching, brainstorming, and reading things online, and I like keeping useful outputs in Obsidian because it’s where my long-term notes live.

But getting Al chats into Obsidian still feels more annoying than it should.

Copy/paste works, but it gets tedious fast: formatting can be messy, source context is easy to lose, and I still have to decide where the note should go, whether to add properties, and how to keep it from becoming another random disconnected file in the vault.

Full chat exports are not ideal either. They can preserve context, but they usually bring in too much noise: repeated prompts, half-useful drafts, clarifications, and back-and-forth that only mattered in the moment.

I've been thinking about how to make this fit more naturally into the Markdown workflow, so I built this flow into SurfMind. It's been pretty handy and has saved me a lot of time and effort:

1. Ask Al to summarize or select only useful chat messages
2. Export those messages into Obsidian as Markdown
3. Save them into a folder like "Al Inbox"
4. Review, link, and move the note later

Obsidian export demo

Would love to hear how others handle this. Do you use any tools, plugins, or workflows to export AI chats into Obsidian?

I just came across this blog post about using SurfMind. The article highlights the "Bring Your Own Model" approach, and honestly, the local hosting part is what really sold me.

A few things that stood out:

• Privacy: Since it's BYOM, your data doesn't go through a proxy server. You can literally use tools like Ollama or LM Studio to keep everything 100% on your device.
• Convenience: You just plug in your own model to SurfMind and can immediately use all its powerful features without any extra setup
• Multi-Page Research: The blog mentions "stacking" tabs to compare products or info across multiple sites. I didn't realize it handled context that well across different tabs.

I’m curious how everyone here is using it? Are most of you sticking to API keys for Claude/GPT, or are you running local models to keep things private?