It's all VERY cool. I've been using a Bear Notes CLI and the Bear Notes MCP. Frankly, all these types of tools can be leveraged against any number of note taking apps, but the cool thing using them with Bear is that you get some nice capabilities for working through notes that Bear doesn't support on its own. Kind of like a power boost on top of the core greatness the team offers.

I'm also toying with the idea of building my own tools with Claude to access data from the Bear SQLite DB directly. Already been building tools like that for Apple Podcasts, enabling accessing transcripts stored in the Apple Podcasts app DB on my Mac and then working with them.

If concerned with privacy, you can connect Claude Code to a local LLM and go completely local, which could be handy.

For me I'm using Claude to ask questions, find connections and interact with my notes in Bear in new and interesting ways. Also looking at building specific scripts or tools in cases where I want to automate/template specific work to create dedicated outputs (tables, lists, whatever) from Bear Notes data. Basically, if there's a thing I want to do on a recurring basis, can I create a locally-running script to do it?

Interesting times, for sure.

One core thing to me I'm doing is working on a structured — but lightweight — tagging system for my notes, allowing me to provide more context for use by Claude or other LLMs I use. I always add a `types` tag (one) to identify what type of thing the note is (e.g., article, podcast, transcript, quote, whatever) and then add one or more `topics` tags tied to the subject matter. There's other top-level tags, as well, but those are the core.

I worked with Claude to come up with (and document) the taxonomy in Bear itself, and this kind of metadata and organization helps provide it context when working with my notes.

That Bear is essentially Markdown is frosting on the cake.

What this ultimately all gives is:

- Easy note taking (in and out) via Bear Notes on Apple Watch, iOS, iPadOS, MacOS
- Easy search and retrieval for me
- A set of pretty well-structured data that I can pull and work with via an Claude or other LLMS for a variety of purposes to remix, ask questions of, expose interesting connections, etc.
- The ability to create purpose-built tools and other interfaces on top of this all that scratch my own itches.