{"id":610,"slug":"research-first-tooling-stack-2026","title":"Reference: research-first tooling stack 2026 — Obsidian + Git + Quartz/Astro + AI overlay (RAG)","kind":"reference","scope":"business","status":"current","audiences":["claude-code","dev","candid-team"],"topics":["tech-stack","knowledge-base","editorial-discipline"],"reference_body":"**Recommended default stack for a small operation (2026):**\n\n- **Capture + foundation research: Obsidian** (local-first, markdown, free personal use, $50/user/year commercial). Bidirectional linking and graph view are the operational expression of \"compounding research.\" Plain markdown means no vendor lock-in.\n- **Public knowledge base: static site built from the same markdown files** — practitioners use Eleventy, Astro, Next.js, or **Quartz** (designed for Obsidian-to-web publishing). Gwern.net is the high-water mark (Pandoc + Hakyll). **The public KB is generated from the same source files as the private research, not maintained separately.**\n- **Drafting articles:** whatever the writer already uses, with foundation notes open in a second window. Some draft directly in Obsidian; others use iA Writer / Ulysses / Google Docs and paste back.\n- **Marketing pages:** the existing CMS, with explicit link-outs to the KB. The KB is the substrate the marketing site rests on, not its replacement.\n\n**Why not Notion alone:** strong for team collaboration and structured databases; weaker for dense-linking atomic notes. Many practitioners use Notion for operations + Obsidian for thinking.\n\n**Why not Roam/Logseq:** Both credible. Roam pioneered bidirectional-link UX; Logseq is open-source and outline-first. Choose based on whether you think in pages (Obsidian) or outlines (Logseq).\n\n**The AI layer (2026 reality):** Smart Connections, Copilot for Obsidian, and similar plugins let a writer query their own KB conversationally. **This is the most material change since 2023: a research-first KB is now also a working RAG corpus for the writer's own AI assistant.**\n\n**Non-negotiables regardless of tool:**\n- Plain text (markdown) under version control (Git)\n- Dated, sourced atomic notes\n- Linking discipline rather than folder discipline\n- Visible \"last updated\" timestamp on every public artifact\n\n**The Candid KB itself uses the Postgres+Express+server-rendered HTML variant** — see [[project-candid-kb]] for that infrastructure. The Obsidian recommendation here is for *client* work and for any solo operator following the methodology.","rationale_body":null,"metadata":null,"links":{"outgoing":[{"slug":"research-first-workflow-stages-0-to-5","title":"Reference framework: Research-first workflow — 5 stages (Capture → Foundation → Synthesis → Article → Marketing page → Maintain)","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"depends-on"},{"slug":"matuschak-evergreen-notes","title":"Andy Matuschak: evergreen notes — atomic, concept-oriented, densely linked, accreting over time","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"relates-to"}],"incoming":[{"slug":"research-brief-research-before-pages","title":"Research brief: Research Before Pages — methodology for KB-backed websites (piece 14 of 15)","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"relates-to"}]},"created_at":"2026-05-22T20:46:33.413Z","updated_at":"2026-05-22T20:46:33.413Z"}