Author(s): Enzyme | Source(s): https://www.enzyme.garden/blog/the-case-against-tagging-your-notes
I want to make the case that your vault is more retrievable than you think — and that the energy you’d spend fixing your tags is better spent writing more.
inbox I do spend a lot of time fixing my tags
The first version of Enzyme did what most RAG systems do: chunk documents, embed them, match against a query. It worked. The results were accurate. And something about them felt dead.
The problem wasn’t precision. It was that chunked retrieval treats your vault like a database. You ask a question, it returns a row. But that’s not how anyone relates to their own accumulated thinking. You don’t want the answer — you want to be reminded of how you were thinking when you wrote it. You want the surrounding context, the adjacent ideas, the thread you were pulling on. The note is a point on a trail, and the trail is what matters.
That experience is what pushed me toward a different architecture: one where tags, links, and folders become sites for generating thematic handles — questions and tensions that probe what your vault is thinking about — rather than filters for narrowing results. Search runs through those thematic handles, not through your metadata. Your tag #decision-making contributes to the context that generates a catalyst like “What does it look like to commit before you have full information?” But the search itself never looks at the tag.
The result that surprised me: the owner had been writing about entrepreneurship — the energy of building something, early-stage friction. Enzyme surfaced a journal entry from a hiking trip two and a half years back. The words he used to describe navigating unfamiliar terrain rhymed with how he’d been writing about navigating early business decisions. No tag connected those entries. The connection existed in the language, and temporal weighting of recent entries created the lens that found it.
inbox but can you outsource creative linking? you can find relationships between language, but does that match the feeling. Maybe just still a better way to retrieve similar and make a decision about the context and meaning you are searching for
When you tag a note #creativity, you’re betting that “creativity” is the useful axis for that note later. Maybe it is. But six months from now, when you’re thinking about risk tolerance, that note about creative process — which is really about tolerating ambiguity — stays filed under a category that doesn’t match your current question.
This compounds. A mature tag hierarchy becomes a theory about how your knowledge is organized. The theory hardens. Autocomplete suggests existing tags. New tags feel like overhead. The categories that don’t exist yet — the ones that would capture what you’re actually thinking about now — never get created.
inbox need to allow yourself to tag heavily and allow yourself to make new
J: Enzyme uses thematic handles
Tags are useful — just not load-bearing
I still use tags. They’re good as lightweight clustering signals. A vault with tags gives the system more entity sources, which means more granular thematic handles, which means richer retrieval. Tags help.
The guilt about inconsistent tagging, the friction of categorizing in the moment, the hours spent designing tag systems — that effort is aimed at a retrieval mechanism that isn’t doing what you think it’s doing. Your tags are hints. They’re not the search index.
Structure helps for manual retrieval — following your own links, filtering by tags you remember. But when retrieval uses temporal reasoning and thematic search, the value of your vault scales with the volume and honesty of the writing, not the precision of the metadata.
Enzyme indexes Obsidian vaults using temporal decay and catalyst-mediated semantic search. Tags enhance it but aren’t required. If you’ve been writing without structure and wondering whether any of it is retrievable — it is.
J: Enzyme description