Reference: research-first tooling stack 2026 — Obsidian + Git + Quartz/Astro + AI overlay (RAG)
Recommended default stack for a small operation (2026):
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
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).
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.
Non-negotiables regardless of tool:
- Plain text (markdown) under version control (Git)
- Dated, sourced atomic notes
- Linking discipline rather than folder discipline
- Visible "last updated" timestamp on every public artifact
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.