Steph Ango

Steph Ango — who designs and writes under the handle “kepano” — is the CEO of Obsidian, the plain-text knowledge base used by millions to keep notes as local Markdown files they own outright. A designer by background, he became a superfan of the app before joining and eventually leading the company, and he is the author of the widely shared “File over app” essay arguing that the artifacts you create should outlive the software that made them.

Human-first, not AI-first

As nearly every productivity tool raced to bolt a chatbot into its interface, Ango steered Obsidian the other way. Rather than embedding an always-on “Ask AI” button, Obsidian kept its local-first, open-format design and instead released an open-source “Obsidian Skills” repository that lets external AI agents read and write a vault through documented formats — AI as an optional guest, not the centre of the product. Ango’s consistent argument is that people do their best thinking when tools preserve agency and give users room to shape the system, rather than replacing that judgment with automation.

His stance is a philosophical objection, not a boycott: he is not against AI as technology, and Obsidian accommodates it at the edges. What he resists is the “AI-first” design pattern — software that thinks for you, locks your work into opaque servers, and erodes ownership. In an industry where “AI-native” has become a mandatory marketing badge, keeping a flagship tool defiantly file-based and human-centred is itself a kind of dissent.