Do backlinks even matter anymore?

Created on: 7/26/2025

For the last five years I thought that backlinks as implemented by Roam Research and then supercharged with supertags in Tana were the most significant feature in knowledge work, because they enabled serendipitous rediscovery of information. Because they created an intricate web of knowledge.

But after two years of using AI, and in particular after using Claude Code for a while now I’m not so sure anymore. Isn’t plain text all you need? Agents can discover it with grep, and if you’re really wild you can periodically put it into a graph database or something for better discoverability for them.

Which is basically what Tana does in a much, much nicer UI - but I think I’m mostly wondering about the manual practice of placing links to stuff.