Published Apr 30, 2026, 9:30 AM EDT
Yadullah Abidi is a Computer Science graduate from the University of Delhi and holds a postgraduate degree in Journalism from the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai. With over a decade of experience in Windows and Linux systems, programming, PC hardware, cybersecurity, malware analysis, and gaming, he combines deep technical knowledge with strong editorial instincts.
Yadullah currently writes for MakeUseOf as a Staff Writer, covering cybersecurity, gaming, and consumer tech. He formerly worked as Associate Editor at Candid.Technology and as News Editor at The Mac Observer, where he reported on everything from raging cyberattacks to the latest in Apple tech.
In addition to his journalism work, Yadullah is a full-stack developer with experience in JavaScript/TypeScript, Next.js, the MERN stack, Python, C/C++, and AI/ML. Whether he's analyzing malware, reviewing hardware, or building tools on GitHub, he brings a hands-on, developer’s perspective to tech journalism.
I've been taking my notes digitally for about as long as I can remember. In that time, I've gone through plenty of note-taking apps. At first, it was OneNote and Windows 11's sticky notes, then Notion, and when that didn't work out, I switched to AFFiNE. At this point, I've got half a decade's worth of notes scattered across different apps, and organizing them has turned out to be a bigger task than I imagined.
When I ditched Notion for AFFiNE, I only carried forward relevant notes. It wasn't a full reorganization, but it did cut down the clutter. Now that clutter has regrown, but this time I have Claude Code to help me organize it.
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No app was going to fix my notes
Why better tools won’t solve a messy system
Note-taking apps, whether it's something as simple as Sticky Notes or more complicated tools like Notion, Obsidian, or AFFiNE, give you a lot of options for how you want to organize your notes. They're great at helping you write notes, but terrible at making sense of them, at least until you manually step in and organize everything.
Every app I've tried has a ton of organization features. I'm talking folders, tags, search bars, and even AI support with the implied promise that using these features consistently will help you stay on top of your notes. But if you're like me and treat your notes app as a dumping ground for your thoughts, there's not much the app itself can do to help you out.
Another problem is that notes are personal. A folder called "article ideas" means nothing to an algorithm, but it means a lot to me. Getting value out of that folder requires someone, or something, to analyze what it means and organize it accordingly. Thankfully, AI assistants such as Claude Code are perfect for the job.
AFFiNE
OS Windows, macOS, Linux
Developer Toeverything
Price model Free, Open-source
AFFiNE is a workspace with fully merged docs, whiteboards, and databases.
Getting the data ready matters
Cleaning and structuring years of notes before anything else
You can't just start chatting with Claude and expect it to do everything for you. Depending on how extensive your notes are, there's a decent amount of legwork required to collect everything in one place so Claude can easily access and reorganize what's needed. Thankfully, I use AFFiNE, which saves notes locally on my disk, meaning I can just copy AFFiNE's data directories and dump them in a folder for Claude to start working with. You can also choose to export individual pages as Markdown or PDF files if you want.
This approach not only helps give you a backup in case Claude messes something up, it also gives you the chance to collect all your notes in one place. My two most frequently used note apps are Sticky Notes on Windows 11 and AFFiNE. AFFiNE's source Markdown files were easy to find, but Sticky Notes can be tricky. Ideally, you're supposed to find a plum.sqlite file containing all your notes at the following path:
C:\Users%USERNAME%\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.MicrosoftStickyNotes_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState
However, that folder did not exist on my Windows 11 installation. So I went around the hard way and manually copied and pasted each sticky note into a text file, which was promptly moved into the same folder as my AFFiNE Markdown files.
Organizing my notes with Claude Code
Turning chaos into something actually searchable
Before you start organizing notes, you're going to have to download Claude's desktop or terminal apps. Both work fine, but I recommend you choose the terminal version for tasks that require direct file manipulation. On Windows, you can install Claude Code terminal with a single PowerShell command:
curl -fsSL https://claude.ai/install.cmd -o install.cmd && install.cmd && del install.cmd
Claude requires Git for Windows to track changes to files. Additionally, you'll have to add its install directory to the Windows PATH environment variable to launch Claude Code from any directory.
Once done, you can start Claude Code in any directory by opening a Windows Terminal window and typing claude. You'll be prompted to log in with your Claude account to finish setup.
After Claude Code is up and running, I started by asking it to analyze the folder it was in. It should be able to understand that it's running in a local app data directory for your note-taking app. I did this just to have more control over the organization process and to better see what Claude is doing. This process might take a while, and Claude Code might repeatedly ask your permission to install necessary tools and create additional files, so don't leave your terminal unattended.
In my case, Claude ended up creating multiple small reader scripts to access the SQLite database that AFFiNE uses to store its data. Once it went through the database, it automatically cleaned up any scripts it made and presented a five-phase checklist for organizing my notes.
Claude came up with a rather versatile to-do list for me, but if you want it to go in a different direction, now is your chance to tell the AI model what to do. Once done, ask it to power through the to-do list, and you should have a fully organized collection of notes. It'll even ask you follow-up questions as it's organizing your notes, such as whether you want to keep certain files or not.
As a bonus, once the organization process is complete, you can come back to Claude and ask it questions about your notes. This is an especially helpful side effect in the sense that you can quickly find what you were thinking at any given point in time. If it's in your notes, Claude will find what you're looking for, or just give you a general idea of where you were headed.
The shoebox is finally sorted
Why this approach worked when everything else didn’t
I was able to collect thoughts from pretty much my entire professional career as a software developer and journalist in an afternoon—a task that would otherwise have taken me well beyond a full weekend. I can continue working on my now-organized notes in AFFiNE, and Claude takes care of any organization issues. Not to mention it also pulls double duty as a search engine for my own thoughts. It's one of the biggest reasons why I started using Claude instead of several apps, and I'm not going back.
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Organizing this mess taught me that the problem was never finding the right app. The problem was that I needed a reader, not a container. I needed something that could engage with my content, understand it, and make changes accordingly. Claude turned out to be the closest thing to that—not perfect, not a replacement for clear thinking, but a remarkably useful tool to organize that messy stage in my brain where ideas are half-formed.