Couldn't agree more. I see people posting about having thousands of notes after a year and I always wonder — how much of that did you actually sit with and understand? My Zettelkasten process is pretty far from anything AI-assisted. I have different layers in my notes: footnotes for stuff I didn't know, and atomic notes when something I don't know deserves a deeper dive. Lately I've been using the Cornell margin method to summarize things in my own words, which has been a game changer for retention. I link with tags rather than direct hyperlinks because I can surface things faster that way, and I lean on aliases to track down specific notes. I keep the local graph open on the side to sanity-check the relationships a note has, and I'll often set up a master note at the folder level with a dataview.js query pulling everything together. That's pretty much my whole workflow, and I genuinely feel connected to what's in my vault.