There’s a quiet shift happening in the way people build software and if you spend any time in communities around tools like Obsidian, you’ve probably already seen it. Conversations that used to focus on which plugins to install are now turning toward something different: building your own tools or BYOT. BYOT is my own term but most call it “vibe coding”. This is where you use AI agents like Claude Code, Codex or Gemini CLI to create and maintain personal, custom tools without needing deep traditional programming knowledge.
The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy in February 2025 and it blew up fast. Fun fact, Collins English Dictionary even named it their Word of the Year for 2025. The idea is straightforward. Describe what you want in natural language, let an AI write the code, and keep nudging it until it actually does what you need.
With this power, Obsidian has truly become a platform I can build on. I’ve built a number of plugins of my own using AI-assisted coding, partly because I enjoy it, but mostly because of the community plugin risks. Here’s what I’ve built:
- PDF Highlight Extractor — I run a hotkey and it pulls every highlight, annotation, and comment from a PDF into a structured note. Deleted highlights get flagged rather than silently removed, and links take me back to the exact location in the PDF.
- TickTick Obsidian Sync — a full two-way sync between Obsidian and TickTick. It pulls everything down on first run (including attachments), lets me write task descriptions in Markdown, and syncs checklists and images back up automatically. It also doubles as a local backup of everything in TickTick.
- WordPress Publisher — I write in Obsidian and publish to WordPress. Add a tag, hit upload, done. Images upload once and aren’t duplicated on edits. I tested it live during a walkthrough — the post was live in about thirty seconds.
- MindMap Plus — a full mind mapping canvas inside Obsidian with collapsible nodes, embedded notes, YouTube video embeds, and image nodes. Import and export via Markdown, CSV, or HTML.
- Multi-Tools Bundle — a bunch of smaller utilities I combined into one plugin: an auto-banner inserter for new notes, a highlight tracker with reminders and vault-wide search, a datetime picker, an image inserter from Unsplash, and a tab deduplicator.
With community plugins you’re trusting an unknown dev or devs with access to not just your data but potentially your entire device. So I built these because I needed them to work a specific way and because I wasn’t comfortable with the risk to reward using the community equivalent, if there was one.
What’s the down-side?
There are many counter arguments to vide-coding and I agree that it’s not all “Pie in the Sky” as some might tell you. A December 2025 analysis of 470 open-source GitHub pull requests found AI co-authored code had roughly 1.7 times more major issues than human-written code, and security vulnerabilities showed up at nearly 3 times the rate.
The way I see it, context is everything. Vibe coding a personal Obsidian plugin is a completely different risk calculation than shipping production software to paying customers. I’m the only one running this code, on my machine, for my use case. That changes things considerably.
And as stated in the report there are ways to mitigate many of the common issues that come with vibe coding. Not only can I put in guardrails and train the AI, as I iterate through the process of vibe coding I to learn new skills and get better at building solutions with the assistance of AI.
The biggest negative to building your own tools, even with AI, that I see is that it takes time to build, test and iterate. And if you have no experience with building apps nor the willingness to learn you might be better off excepting the risk that comes with using a community plugin.
What’s Your Take?
The vibe coding shift is happening whether the skeptics like it or not but how it plays out depends a lot on how people use it. Are you building your own tools, or does the idea feel too risky or too complex to bother with? Has AI-assisted coding been a net win for your workflow?
As more people gain the ability to build exactly what they need, does that feel like liberation or like a recipe for a lot of broken, half-maintained plugins floating around?
