In any case, nowhere is it indicated why this approach (no matter what you call it) should be preferred over e.g. recfiles.
Point on comparison with other formats is really well taken. I think the main argument i would have is ubiquity of markdown and markdown tooling.
Disclaimer: My project
A “summary” field that can act as a preview when listing your files so your agent’s context doesn’t get jammed.
Specifically, my observation was lots of people use a collection of markdown files (or other data formats) in a git repository to crowdsource data. This ties in really nicely with a lot of static site generators.
I was interested in seeing if a tool could help data reuse and help people who aren't comfortable with git contribute.
I told AI to improve on that format and told me having to read all files just to get the frontmatter data is optimizable, sooo... to the trenches B)
AI > The problem with Frontmatter+YAML is O(n) read complexity. To know if a file is a "Person" or a "Meeting Note," the parser must read the entire file into memory, parse the YAML block, and then discard the content. For a vault of 10,000+ files, this becomes a massive I/O bottleneck
Much better off storing this in an embedded graph database and use cypher.
MVCC, Indexes, Strong typing, WAL, changefeeds.
The simplicity of markdown and JSON are deceptive. SQLite is a solid choice, but then you deal with graph-relational impedance mismatch.
I’d flip the question towards the benefits more complicated solutions give you. One conclusion might be “not enough”.
Your filesystem is very much not a database, and you risk data corruption and loss by using markdown files as a database, especially if you have multiple programs reading and writing to and from the same files. Things will start getting weird and you will start rebuilding an ACID compliant database engine in your application layer.
That said, I love markdown. It's great. Simple.
For applications requiring simultaneous writes from multiple programs (concurrency) or ACID transaction properties, using Markdown files as a substitute for a database is undoubtedly an anti-pattern and entails a risk of data corruption.
Strictly we could have titled this: the markdown database pattern for small personal databases.
The point was that for personal use e.g. keeping a list of projects, or books etc this is perfect. Or even for maintaining this list on a website.
It isn't for multiple simultaneous writes