[pietz]

It has been wild watching deta over the years.

They didn't pivot, they completely reinvented themselves. Twice.

I loved their first cloud offering, which they sadly abandoned.

Then they launched Space, which was kinda cool, but mostly weird and raised the question "why?". Also cancelled.

Surf looks mostly cool, although I also don't quite understand it. It seems like Notion with a different twist on AI. Not sure. Since I'm fairly happy with my Obsidian + Codex setup, I'll pass for now. The good news is, this one's open source!

I'd love to know how they're financing all of this. They have been around for years and users never even had the option to drop money in their lap. Now they're trying open source. Wild ride.

All the best!

PS: I would have paid for deta cloud Pro ;)

[mxek]

Thanks for this.

You forgot about the Deta Studio and the Horizon desktop app ;)

But on your question -- we're backed by supportive investors, and try to be frugal (we've had our fair share of sardines & rice).

[abdelhai]

this tells me nothing; a good Portuguese can goes for upwards of $20

[chrisweekly]

hey Pietz, have you written up your obsidian + codex setup? I'm a die-hard obsidian user, didn't like codex 6mo ago but heard it's gotten much better, so I'm very interested if you're willing to share TIA!

[pietz]

Oh, it's nothing fancy I'm afraid.

I have an AGENTS.md file in my vault that provides a bit of context that this is not about coding, but about serving as my Obsidian helper. I ask it to check the .obsidian folder to check my plugins, Tell it how I like to build my presentations and the workflow I follow when writing articles.

Then I just launch codex in the terminal inside the vault, have it do stuff, while I watch the desktop app for change.

Other coding agents like Claude Code should work also, but gpt-5-codex was specifically trained on using the terminal to do everything it and doesn't even have that big of a system prompt related to coding. Works well.

Combine that with a speech-to-text app and codex blazes through to find stuff or do things for me.

[chrisweekly]

Cool, thanks!

[mhuffman]

In either case, I am just happy that Knuth's idea of Literate programming is becoming more and more of a common reality after so many years.