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Claude Code + Obsidian + 1 free GitHub skill = unlimited memory. Almost nobody is running this yet. Here’s the problem nobody tells you. Claude forgets you. Every new chat starts at 0. You re explain your business, your projects, your style every single time. That tax is why...

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West Lord

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108,158 views • 1 month ago •via X (Twitter)

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CLAUDE JUST TURNED OBSIDIAN INTO A BRAIN THAT NEVER FORGETS (FOR $0) Someone connected Claude straight to their Obsidian vault. Now the AI reads and writes every note they own. Every client, every idea, every project. Instant recall. Runs on Claude + Obsidian. One evening. Zero code. The numbers are insane: - Notion AI: $10/month forever - A "second brain" course: $500 to $2,000 - An assistant to organize your notes: $3,000/month - This setup: $0 - Time to build: one evening - Skill required: copy the steps The opportunity is even wilder: People sell Notion "second brain" templates for $99 to $499. You just built something better for free, and it never forgets. One free vault can hold the entire memory of your business: clients, content, SOPs, ideas. One person + Claude + Obsidian + one evening = an infinite memory that never forgets. Save and watch the clip.
13:03

CLAUDE JUST TURNED OBSIDIAN INTO A BRAIN THAT NEVER FORGETS (FOR $0) Someone connected Claude straight to their Obsidian vault. Now the AI reads and writes every note they own. Every client, every idea, every project. Instant recall. Runs on Claude + Obsidian. One evening. Zero code. The numbers are insane: - Notion AI: $10/month forever - A "second brain" course: $500 to $2,000 - An assistant to organize your notes: $3,000/month - This setup: $0 - Time to build: one evening - Skill required: copy the steps The opportunity is even wilder: People sell Notion "second brain" templates for $99 to $499. You just built something better for free, and it never forgets. One free vault can hold the entire memory of your business: clients, content, SOPs, ideas. One person + Claude + Obsidian + one evening = an infinite memory that never forgets. Save and watch the clip.

shmidt

57,347 views • 1 month ago

A 26-YEAR-OLD AI ENGINEER WHOSE BIRMINGHAM THESIS OUTPERFORMED GOOGLE SCHOLAR BY 50% JUST SHIPPED GRAPHIFY: ONE COMMAND TURNS ANY FOLDER INTO A CLAUDE CODE SECOND BRAIN Safi Shamsi built Graphify 48 hours after Karpathy posted his LLM wiki idea. It turns any folder, codebase, docs, PDFs, into a knowledge graph Claude reads instead of grepping. Up to 43x fewer tokens per query. The trick almost nobody is using yet: one flag exports the entire graph as a fully-linked Obsidian vault. Repo: /safishamsi/graphify Setup, end to end: 1. Install: uv tool install graphifyy (or pipx install graphifyy). Verify with graphify --version. 2. Install the skill in Claude Code: graphify claude install. This wires Graphify into Claude Code so you can call it as a skill. 3. Open the folder you want mapped in Claude Code. In the terminal: graphify . It extracts every concept and builds the graph in graphify-out/. 4. Export to Obsidian: graphify . --obsidian. Writes one note per concept, every relationship as a wikilink, every node linked back to its source. 5. Open the new vault in Obsidian (Manage vaults → Open folder as a vault), or drag it as a subfolder into your existing one. That's it. Your Claude Code instance now has a navigable map of the codebase that loads instantly instead of re-reading files every session. Full step-by-step build of the Claude + Obsidian second brain in the article below. Bookmark this
16:36

A 26-YEAR-OLD AI ENGINEER WHOSE BIRMINGHAM THESIS OUTPERFORMED GOOGLE SCHOLAR BY 50% JUST SHIPPED GRAPHIFY: ONE COMMAND TURNS ANY FOLDER INTO A CLAUDE CODE SECOND BRAIN Safi Shamsi built Graphify 48 hours after Karpathy posted his LLM wiki idea. It turns any folder, codebase, docs, PDFs, into a knowledge graph Claude reads instead of grepping. Up to 43x fewer tokens per query. The trick almost nobody is using yet: one flag exports the entire graph as a fully-linked Obsidian vault. Repo: /safishamsi/graphify Setup, end to end: 1. Install: uv tool install graphifyy (or pipx install graphifyy). Verify with graphify --version. 2. Install the skill in Claude Code: graphify claude install. This wires Graphify into Claude Code so you can call it as a skill. 3. Open the folder you want mapped in Claude Code. In the terminal: graphify . It extracts every concept and builds the graph in graphify-out/. 4. Export to Obsidian: graphify . --obsidian. Writes one note per concept, every relationship as a wikilink, every node linked back to its source. 5. Open the new vault in Obsidian (Manage vaults → Open folder as a vault), or drag it as a subfolder into your existing one. That's it. Your Claude Code instance now has a navigable map of the codebase that loads instantly instead of re-reading files every session. Full step-by-step build of the Claude + Obsidian second brain in the article below. Bookmark this

Yarchi

141,580 views • 1 month ago

YOUR AI IS FORGETTING EVERYTHING YOU TAUGHT IT YESTERDAY. That is why most outputs still feel generic. The people getting real leverage in 2026 fixed this with one setup: Obsidian + Claude Code. Obsidian stores your thinking. Claude Code reads the patterns. Your notes become permanent context the agent can access anytime: Daily thoughts. Projects. Ideas. Contradictions. Questions you keep returning to. Then the real unlock: Custom slash commands. `/context` loads your recent thinking instantly. `/emerge` finds hidden ideas across your notes. `/challenge` tests your beliefs against your past writing. `/trace` maps how your thinking evolved over time. One critical rule: The AI never writes to the vault. You write. The agent reads. That is what keeps the system valuable. At first it feels like note-taking. Eventually it feels like a second brain.
0:49

YOUR AI IS FORGETTING EVERYTHING YOU TAUGHT IT YESTERDAY. That is why most outputs still feel generic. The people getting real leverage in 2026 fixed this with one setup: Obsidian + Claude Code. Obsidian stores your thinking. Claude Code reads the patterns. Your notes become permanent context the agent can access anytime: Daily thoughts. Projects. Ideas. Contradictions. Questions you keep returning to. Then the real unlock: Custom slash commands. `/context` loads your recent thinking instantly. `/emerge` finds hidden ideas across your notes. `/challenge` tests your beliefs against your past writing. `/trace` maps how your thinking evolved over time. One critical rule: The AI never writes to the vault. You write. The agent reads. That is what keeps the system valuable. At first it feels like note-taking. Eventually it feels like a second brain.

Dami-Defi

41,299 views • 2 months ago

Andrej Karpathy quietly shipped the best second brain idea in years not an app. a pattern. let an llm maintain a wiki of your notes. you dump sources, it reads them, links them, files them. knowledge compounds like interest. someone built it into a free claude code plugin. setup is two commands: claude plugin marketplace add AgriciDaniel/claude-obsidian claude plugin install claude-obsidian@agricidaniel-claude-obsidian then open obsidian, open claude code in the same folder, type /wiki. that's it. your notes are now queryable by claude and they get richer every time you read something. bookmark this. best thing you'll build this weekend.
0:42

Andrej Karpathy quietly shipped the best second brain idea in years not an app. a pattern. let an llm maintain a wiki of your notes. you dump sources, it reads them, links them, files them. knowledge compounds like interest. someone built it into a free claude code plugin. setup is two commands: claude plugin marketplace add AgriciDaniel/claude-obsidian claude plugin install claude-obsidian@agricidaniel-claude-obsidian then open obsidian, open claude code in the same folder, type /wiki. that's it. your notes are now queryable by claude and they get richer every time you read something. bookmark this. best thing you'll build this weekend.

Avid

338,253 views • 2 months ago

Karpathy gave 100,000 people the LLM Wiki idea. 1 guy actually built it into a Claude + Obsidian brain that never forgets you. Every AI tool forgets you the second you close the tab. ChatGPT, Claude, Codex. All gone. He killed that. A shared memory layer your AI builds and maintains on its own. 3 layers. Raw, Wiki, Schema. You drop a source, Claude reads it, pulls the concepts, links them, cites the original, never touches your raw notes. Scales to 1,000s of notes without breaking. Then it goes deeper. An agentic firewall locks agents out of your other vaults. A local model running free and private, zero cloud. 2 videos walk through it all. 1 on why. 1 on the build, start to finish. Most people will keep pasting the same context into 6 tabs for the next 3 years. Build it once. Never explain yourself to a model again.
34:07

Karpathy gave 100,000 people the LLM Wiki idea. 1 guy actually built it into a Claude + Obsidian brain that never forgets you. Every AI tool forgets you the second you close the tab. ChatGPT, Claude, Codex. All gone. He killed that. A shared memory layer your AI builds and maintains on its own. 3 layers. Raw, Wiki, Schema. You drop a source, Claude reads it, pulls the concepts, links them, cites the original, never touches your raw notes. Scales to 1,000s of notes without breaking. Then it goes deeper. An agentic firewall locks agents out of your other vaults. A local model running free and private, zero cloud. 2 videos walk through it all. 1 on why. 1 on the build, start to finish. Most people will keep pasting the same context into 6 tabs for the next 3 years. Build it once. Never explain yourself to a model again.

West Lord

75,208 views • 1 month ago

YOU CAN BUILD AN AI SECOND BRAIN IN 15 MINUTES. No coding experience. No $1000 course. Here is the entire setup. Step 1: Download Claude Desktop. Step 2: Download Obsidian. Step 3: Create a new vault and start dropping .MD files into it. Step 4: Tell Claude Code to connect to your vault using Karpathy's prompt: That is it. Your entire knowledge base becomes searchable, connectable, and queryable by the most powerful AI model on earth. Every note you have ever written. Every idea you have ever captured. Every resource you have ever saved. Claude reads all of it, finds connections you missed, and surfaces insights from your own thinking that you FORGOT you had. Most people use Claude as a search engine. The people building second brains use it as an INTELLIGENCE LAYER on top of everything they know. That gap is the gap between asking Google a question and having a research partner who has read everything you have ever written. Bookmark this. Build it tonight. Follow CyrilXBT
1:19

YOU CAN BUILD AN AI SECOND BRAIN IN 15 MINUTES. No coding experience. No $1000 course. Here is the entire setup. Step 1: Download Claude Desktop. Step 2: Download Obsidian. Step 3: Create a new vault and start dropping .MD files into it. Step 4: Tell Claude Code to connect to your vault using Karpathy's prompt: That is it. Your entire knowledge base becomes searchable, connectable, and queryable by the most powerful AI model on earth. Every note you have ever written. Every idea you have ever captured. Every resource you have ever saved. Claude reads all of it, finds connections you missed, and surfaces insights from your own thinking that you FORGOT you had. Most people use Claude as a search engine. The people building second brains use it as an INTELLIGENCE LAYER on top of everything they know. That gap is the gap between asking Google a question and having a research partner who has read everything you have ever written. Bookmark this. Build it tonight. Follow CyrilXBT

CyrilXBT

259,551 views • 1 month ago

Most people use Claude Code like a chatbot, then wonder why it forgets everything by Tuesday. The ones quietly building $10K AI workflows give it a second brain instead, and it’s free. It’s called Obsidian. You download it, point it at one folder on your computer, and that folder becomes a vault. Every note inside it is now something Claude Code can read end to end. Open Claude in that folder and it’s connected, that simple. The trick isn’t the tool, it’s the map. 3 folders, that’s the whole system. Raw, you dump everything here. Notes, transcripts, screenshots, half thoughts, zero structure. Wiki, Claude reads the raw pile and writes clean Wikipedia style articles about it, structured, searchable, permanent. Output, when you want a deliverable, a PDF, a slide deck, a script, it pulls from the wiki and ships it. Most people skip the wiki layer and feed Claude a junk drawer of 400 files, then blame the model when the answers are garbage. The model isn’t the problem, your folder is. Give it a path it can follow and it finds anything in 1 second, give it chaos and it guesses. You don’t even have to design the structure yourself. Open the vault, tell Claude to build a file system that fits your work, and watch it organize your entire brain in one prompt. Free tool, 3 folders, a second brain that compounds while you sleep. The people falling behind are still copy pasting into a chat window.
1:57

Most people use Claude Code like a chatbot, then wonder why it forgets everything by Tuesday. The ones quietly building $10K AI workflows give it a second brain instead, and it’s free. It’s called Obsidian. You download it, point it at one folder on your computer, and that folder becomes a vault. Every note inside it is now something Claude Code can read end to end. Open Claude in that folder and it’s connected, that simple. The trick isn’t the tool, it’s the map. 3 folders, that’s the whole system. Raw, you dump everything here. Notes, transcripts, screenshots, half thoughts, zero structure. Wiki, Claude reads the raw pile and writes clean Wikipedia style articles about it, structured, searchable, permanent. Output, when you want a deliverable, a PDF, a slide deck, a script, it pulls from the wiki and ships it. Most people skip the wiki layer and feed Claude a junk drawer of 400 files, then blame the model when the answers are garbage. The model isn’t the problem, your folder is. Give it a path it can follow and it finds anything in 1 second, give it chaos and it guesses. You don’t even have to design the structure yourself. Open the vault, tell Claude to build a file system that fits your work, and watch it organize your entire brain in one prompt. Free tool, 3 folders, a second brain that compounds while you sleep. The people falling behind are still copy pasting into a chat window.

West Lord

32,845 views • 1 month ago

THIS MIGHT BE THE #1 OPEN-SOURCE REPO FOR CLAUDE CODE RIGHT NOW. IT GIVES CLAUDE A MEMORY AND SLASHES YOUR TOKEN COST ON EVERY QUESTION The repo is safishamsi/graphify, a free open-source skill that turns any codebase into a knowledge graph Claude Code can read instantly. Instead of grepping through your files every session, Claude gets a map of how everything connects The problem it fixes: Every time you ask Claude Code about a big repo, it does the same thing, greps through dozens of files like a brute-force Ctrl+F, blows through your context window, and sometimes still misses the answer hiding in a file nobody searched. Claude Code has no memory of how your project is structured. Every session starts from zero What it does: It maps your entire codebase into a knowledge graph, capturing not just which files exist, but which functions depend on which, which modules are central, and which files cluster around the same concern. Claude queries the map instead of scanning files How it works, three passes: 1. Code structure, free and local. Tree-sitter parses your files and pulls out classes, functions, imports and call graphs. No LLM, no tokens, just your actual code mapped deterministically 2. Audio and video, if you have them. Transcribed locally and folded into the graph 3. Docs, papers, images. Here an LLM does semantic analysis, figuring out what each document means and where it fits. Only the meaning gets sent up, never your raw source It saves you money: Normally a question about a big repo makes Claude spawn explore agents that scan file after file, eating your context window and your token budget before you get an answer. With the graph already built, Claude queries the map instead of re-reading the codebase every time. Same answer, a fraction of the tokens. The graph only gets built once, then a hook rebuilds it after each commit for free, so you never pay that scanning cost again. The bigger the repo, the bigger the gap The best parts: it's a skill, so once installed Claude knows when to use it without you memorizing commands. It works on non-code folders too, point it at docs or notes and it can spin up an Obsidian vault How to add it to your Claude: 1. Install Claude Code if you haven't: npm install -g Paul Jankura-ai/claude-code 2. Add the skill: claude skill add safishamsi/graphify 3. Open your project folder and run /graphify . to build the graph 4. Optional, make it automatic: graphify hook install so the graph rebuilds after every commit That's it. Ask Claude about your repo and it reads the map instead of burning tokens on a file hunt Bookmark this
13:23

THIS MIGHT BE THE #1 OPEN-SOURCE REPO FOR CLAUDE CODE RIGHT NOW. IT GIVES CLAUDE A MEMORY AND SLASHES YOUR TOKEN COST ON EVERY QUESTION The repo is safishamsi/graphify, a free open-source skill that turns any codebase into a knowledge graph Claude Code can read instantly. Instead of grepping through your files every session, Claude gets a map of how everything connects The problem it fixes: Every time you ask Claude Code about a big repo, it does the same thing, greps through dozens of files like a brute-force Ctrl+F, blows through your context window, and sometimes still misses the answer hiding in a file nobody searched. Claude Code has no memory of how your project is structured. Every session starts from zero What it does: It maps your entire codebase into a knowledge graph, capturing not just which files exist, but which functions depend on which, which modules are central, and which files cluster around the same concern. Claude queries the map instead of scanning files How it works, three passes: 1. Code structure, free and local. Tree-sitter parses your files and pulls out classes, functions, imports and call graphs. No LLM, no tokens, just your actual code mapped deterministically 2. Audio and video, if you have them. Transcribed locally and folded into the graph 3. Docs, papers, images. Here an LLM does semantic analysis, figuring out what each document means and where it fits. Only the meaning gets sent up, never your raw source It saves you money: Normally a question about a big repo makes Claude spawn explore agents that scan file after file, eating your context window and your token budget before you get an answer. With the graph already built, Claude queries the map instead of re-reading the codebase every time. Same answer, a fraction of the tokens. The graph only gets built once, then a hook rebuilds it after each commit for free, so you never pay that scanning cost again. The bigger the repo, the bigger the gap The best parts: it's a skill, so once installed Claude knows when to use it without you memorizing commands. It works on non-code folders too, point it at docs or notes and it can spin up an Obsidian vault How to add it to your Claude: 1. Install Claude Code if you haven't: npm install -g Paul Jankura-ai/claude-code 2. Add the skill: claude skill add safishamsi/graphify 3. Open your project folder and run /graphify . to build the graph 4. Optional, make it automatic: graphify hook install so the graph rebuilds after every commit That's it. Ask Claude about your repo and it reads the map instead of burning tokens on a file hunt Bookmark this

Yarchi

55,345 views • 2 months ago

Obsidian + method Karpathy + Claude Code = a quantum second brain that talks back. Most second brains are graveyards you clip 300 articles, tag 80 notes, build a graph that looks like a galaxy, then never open it again. Karpathy fix is stupid simple: 1 file, append only, new thought on top, review by scrolling no folders, no tags, no 40-minute “PKM setup” videos. The capture layer is 1 Obsidian vault with 1 file called stream md, where every idea, quote and link lands in under 10 seconds, because anything slower and you quit by day 4. Once a week Claude Code reads the whole vault from the terminal with 1 prompt “find the 5 ideas I keep circling without noticing” and sees patterns across 6 months you can’t hold in working memory. Instead of searching keywords you ask questions like “what did I think about agent pricing in March,” and Claude greps 4,000 notes and quotes your own words back with file paths. Then the vault becomes context drafting a post, a pitch or a spec, Claude pulls in your past thinking instead of generic internet mush, and your output starts sounding like you, compressed. The first week feels pointless at 20 notes, month 1 brings the first “wait, I already solved this” moment, by month 3 Claude connects 2 notes written 70 days apart and that connection becomes your best post of the year, by month 6 you stop asking Google things you already answered. The whole setup costs $0 in software and 1 evening. Notion sells you a workspace, Obsidian gives you files, Claude gives them a voice. Everyone rents a second brain this one lives on your disk and grows. You wrote the notes, and now something finally reads them.
0:27

Obsidian + method Karpathy + Claude Code = a quantum second brain that talks back. Most second brains are graveyards you clip 300 articles, tag 80 notes, build a graph that looks like a galaxy, then never open it again. Karpathy fix is stupid simple: 1 file, append only, new thought on top, review by scrolling no folders, no tags, no 40-minute “PKM setup” videos. The capture layer is 1 Obsidian vault with 1 file called stream md, where every idea, quote and link lands in under 10 seconds, because anything slower and you quit by day 4. Once a week Claude Code reads the whole vault from the terminal with 1 prompt “find the 5 ideas I keep circling without noticing” and sees patterns across 6 months you can’t hold in working memory. Instead of searching keywords you ask questions like “what did I think about agent pricing in March,” and Claude greps 4,000 notes and quotes your own words back with file paths. Then the vault becomes context drafting a post, a pitch or a spec, Claude pulls in your past thinking instead of generic internet mush, and your output starts sounding like you, compressed. The first week feels pointless at 20 notes, month 1 brings the first “wait, I already solved this” moment, by month 3 Claude connects 2 notes written 70 days apart and that connection becomes your best post of the year, by month 6 you stop asking Google things you already answered. The whole setup costs $0 in software and 1 evening. Notion sells you a workspace, Obsidian gives you files, Claude gives them a voice. Everyone rents a second brain this one lives on your disk and grows. You wrote the notes, and now something finally reads them.

West Lord

68,836 views • 28 days ago

You can build an AI second brain in 15 minutes. No coding experience needed. no $1000 course [Here is how you can do it in 5 mins:] Step 1: Download Claude Desktop. Step 2: Download Obsidian Desktop. Step 3: Create a new vault and start dropping .MD files into it. Step 4: Tell Claude Code to connect directly to your vault using Andrej Karpathy's prompt: That is it. Your entire knowledge base becomes searchable, connectable, and queryable by the most powerful AI model on earth. Every note you have ever written. Every idea you have ever captured. Every resource you have ever saved. Claude can now read all of it, find connections you missed, and surface insights from your own thinking that you forgot you had. Most people are using Claude as a search engine. The people building second brains with it are using it as an intelligence layer on top of everything they know. The gap between those two use cases is the gap between asking Google a question and having a research partner who has read everything you have ever written. Bookmark this. Build it tonight.
22:22

You can build an AI second brain in 15 minutes. No coding experience needed. no $1000 course [Here is how you can do it in 5 mins:] Step 1: Download Claude Desktop. Step 2: Download Obsidian Desktop. Step 3: Create a new vault and start dropping .MD files into it. Step 4: Tell Claude Code to connect directly to your vault using Andrej Karpathy's prompt: That is it. Your entire knowledge base becomes searchable, connectable, and queryable by the most powerful AI model on earth. Every note you have ever written. Every idea you have ever captured. Every resource you have ever saved. Claude can now read all of it, find connections you missed, and surface insights from your own thinking that you forgot you had. Most people are using Claude as a search engine. The people building second brains with it are using it as an intelligence layer on top of everything they know. The gap between those two use cases is the gap between asking Google a question and having a research partner who has read everything you have ever written. Bookmark this. Build it tonight.

Avid

35,544 views • 2 months ago

You can build an AI second brain in 15 minutes. No coding experience needed. no $1000 course [Here is how you can do it in 5 mins:] Step 1: Download Claude Desktop. Step 2: Download Obsidian Desktop. Step 3: Create a new vault and start dropping .MD files into it. Step 4: Tell Claude Code to connect directly to your vault using Andrej Karpathy's prompt: That is it. Your entire knowledge base becomes searchable, connectable, and queryable by the most powerful AI model on earth. Every note you have ever written. Every idea you have ever captured. Every resource you have ever saved. Claude can now read all of it, find connections you missed, and surface insights from your own thinking that you forgot you had. Most people are using Claude as a search engine. The people building second brains with it are using it as an intelligence layer on top of everything they know. The gap between those two use cases is the gap between asking Google a question and having a research partner who has read everything you have ever written. Bookmark this. Build it tonight.
1:18

You can build an AI second brain in 15 minutes. No coding experience needed. no $1000 course [Here is how you can do it in 5 mins:] Step 1: Download Claude Desktop. Step 2: Download Obsidian Desktop. Step 3: Create a new vault and start dropping .MD files into it. Step 4: Tell Claude Code to connect directly to your vault using Andrej Karpathy's prompt: That is it. Your entire knowledge base becomes searchable, connectable, and queryable by the most powerful AI model on earth. Every note you have ever written. Every idea you have ever captured. Every resource you have ever saved. Claude can now read all of it, find connections you missed, and surface insights from your own thinking that you forgot you had. Most people are using Claude as a search engine. The people building second brains with it are using it as an intelligence layer on top of everything they know. The gap between those two use cases is the gap between asking Google a question and having a research partner who has read everything you have ever written. Bookmark this. Build it tonight.

Avid

469,325 views • 1 month ago

Obsidian CEO actually released the skill that lets your AI agent run your entire vault for you. It's called obsidian-skills. Install it into Claude Code, Codex, or OpenCode, and your agent can read, create, search, and organize notes directly, plus handle Markdown, Bases, and Canvas files without you touching a thing. This is the missing piece for an AI second brain. Your notes live in Obsidian, and now the agent actually knows how to work them. Want the full picture? We broke down how to build a complete AI second brain from scratch in the article below.
0:23

Obsidian CEO actually released the skill that lets your AI agent run your entire vault for you. It's called obsidian-skills. Install it into Claude Code, Codex, or OpenCode, and your agent can read, create, search, and organize notes directly, plus handle Markdown, Bases, and Canvas files without you touching a thing. This is the missing piece for an AI second brain. Your notes live in Obsidian, and now the agent actually knows how to work them. Want the full picture? We broke down how to build a complete AI second brain from scratch in the article below.

Simplifying AI

68,025 views • 8 days ago

Andrej Karpathy keeps his entire second brain in Obsidian 1 folder of plain text files, nothing else. Here’s the exact setup, free, that turns 1 vault into a brain you can actually query. Why most “second brains” die: Notion is a database you forget to open, ChatGPT memory wipes itself after 30 messages, and both lock your notes inside their cloud. Karpathy rule is the opposite: your notes are the 1 dataset nobody else on earth has, so keep them in plain markdown, own them forever, and let the AI read them later. 3 phases. Phase 1 — Capture with 0 friction. Install Obsidian free, local, 1 hotkey to a daily note. Dump everything into it: ideas, links, quotes, 2-line thoughts, no folders, no tags, no system. Target is 5 notes a day. Phase 2 — Let the graph connect itself. Install Smart Connections and it runs embeddings on every note you’ve ever written, so 2 notes you wrote 4 months apart and never linked by hand suddenly surface as neighbors. That’s the fireworks in the 3D graph each burst is a cluster of ideas your brain forgot it owned. Phase 3 — Query your brain. Point Claude at the vault and ask: “What did I actually think about X across all my notes?” It answers from 1,200 of your own notes, not the internet your taste, your edge, your dataset. The realistic curve looks like this: Week 1 — 40 notes, graph looks empty, feels like a waste. Month 1 — 300 notes, first real cluster forms. Month 3 — 1,200 notes, and the embeddings start surfacing links you’d long forgotten. Month 6 — you stop googling your own past ideas and just ask the vault. Before — 9 tabs, 3 note apps, 0 memory. After — 1 folder, 1,200 notes, 1 brain that compounds. The gap between people who consume and people who compound isn’t talent, it’s architecture. You build your own life so choose the right path.
0:31

Andrej Karpathy keeps his entire second brain in Obsidian 1 folder of plain text files, nothing else. Here’s the exact setup, free, that turns 1 vault into a brain you can actually query. Why most “second brains” die: Notion is a database you forget to open, ChatGPT memory wipes itself after 30 messages, and both lock your notes inside their cloud. Karpathy rule is the opposite: your notes are the 1 dataset nobody else on earth has, so keep them in plain markdown, own them forever, and let the AI read them later. 3 phases. Phase 1 — Capture with 0 friction. Install Obsidian free, local, 1 hotkey to a daily note. Dump everything into it: ideas, links, quotes, 2-line thoughts, no folders, no tags, no system. Target is 5 notes a day. Phase 2 — Let the graph connect itself. Install Smart Connections and it runs embeddings on every note you’ve ever written, so 2 notes you wrote 4 months apart and never linked by hand suddenly surface as neighbors. That’s the fireworks in the 3D graph each burst is a cluster of ideas your brain forgot it owned. Phase 3 — Query your brain. Point Claude at the vault and ask: “What did I actually think about X across all my notes?” It answers from 1,200 of your own notes, not the internet your taste, your edge, your dataset. The realistic curve looks like this: Week 1 — 40 notes, graph looks empty, feels like a waste. Month 1 — 300 notes, first real cluster forms. Month 3 — 1,200 notes, and the embeddings start surfacing links you’d long forgotten. Month 6 — you stop googling your own past ideas and just ask the vault. Before — 9 tabs, 3 note apps, 0 memory. After — 1 folder, 1,200 notes, 1 brain that compounds. The gap between people who consume and people who compound isn’t talent, it’s architecture. You build your own life so choose the right path.

Spike 1%

16,390 views • 1 month ago

THIS GUY CONNECTED HIS AI AGENTS TO HIS OBSIDIAN AND BUILT A BRAIN THAT LEARNS ON ITS OWN. HERE'S HOW TO BUILD IT Obsidian is just markdown files sitting in a folder. That turns out to be the perfect memory for an AI agent, because an agent can read and write those files directly. He wired his agents into the vault so they pull context from it, do the work, and write what they learned back. The notes aren't the point. The loop is, and it gets sharper every cycle How to build it: 1. Point an agent at your vault. The fastest way, no plugins, no API keys: open a terminal and run npx obsidian-mcp /path/to/your/vault. That exposes your Obsidian folder to Claude as a tool it can read, search, and write to. Add it to your Claude Code or Cowork config and restart 2. Confirm it can see the brain. Ask it: "list the notes in my vault and summarize what's in them." If it reads them back, the connection is live. Now it starts every task with everything the vault already holds instead of from zero 3. Give each agent one job and a write-back rule. Tell it: "research this, then save what you found as a new note in /brain with links to related notes." One agent researches, one summarizes, one plans. Each writes its output back into the vault 4. Close the loop. Add one line to every agent's instructions: "read /brain before starting, write your result back when done." Now each task leaves the vault richer, and the next run reads that before it works. It compounds instead of resetting 5. You only steer. Review what the brain produces, point it at the next thing. The agents handle the reading, writing, and connecting The edge isn't better notes. It's a brain that feeds itself, so the work gets sharper every cycle instead of starting over Bookmark this
0:24

THIS GUY CONNECTED HIS AI AGENTS TO HIS OBSIDIAN AND BUILT A BRAIN THAT LEARNS ON ITS OWN. HERE'S HOW TO BUILD IT Obsidian is just markdown files sitting in a folder. That turns out to be the perfect memory for an AI agent, because an agent can read and write those files directly. He wired his agents into the vault so they pull context from it, do the work, and write what they learned back. The notes aren't the point. The loop is, and it gets sharper every cycle How to build it: 1. Point an agent at your vault. The fastest way, no plugins, no API keys: open a terminal and run npx obsidian-mcp /path/to/your/vault. That exposes your Obsidian folder to Claude as a tool it can read, search, and write to. Add it to your Claude Code or Cowork config and restart 2. Confirm it can see the brain. Ask it: "list the notes in my vault and summarize what's in them." If it reads them back, the connection is live. Now it starts every task with everything the vault already holds instead of from zero 3. Give each agent one job and a write-back rule. Tell it: "research this, then save what you found as a new note in /brain with links to related notes." One agent researches, one summarizes, one plans. Each writes its output back into the vault 4. Close the loop. Add one line to every agent's instructions: "read /brain before starting, write your result back when done." Now each task leaves the vault richer, and the next run reads that before it works. It compounds instead of resetting 5. You only steer. Review what the brain produces, point it at the next thing. The agents handle the reading, writing, and connecting The edge isn't better notes. It's a brain that feeds itself, so the work gets sharper every cycle instead of starting over Bookmark this

Yarchi

58,186 views • 2 months ago

Obsidian just became the most dangerous folder on your computer, and Andrej Karpathy predicted it with 1 markdown file. His method is called append-and-review. He described it years ago and almost nobody listened: 1 single note, every thought appended to the top, reviewed on random scrolls. No tags, no folders, no Notion dashboards with 40 linked databases. The problem was always the same the note remembers, but it can't act. That changed the moment people pointed Claude Code at an Obsidian vault. Here's the setup that's quietly spreading: Part 1 — The vault becomes a database. Obsidian stores everything as plain markdown on your disk, which means Claude Code can read it like a codebase. You open a terminal inside the vault folder and your 2,000 notes turn into queryable memory. Part 2 — The CLAUDEmd file becomes the brain stem. One file at the root tells the agent who you are, what you're building, and how your notes are structured. From that point every session starts with full context instead of a blank chat window. Part 3 — Karpathy append log becomes fuel. You dump raw thoughts all day ideas, links, half-sentences. Then 1 command at night: review today's appends, extract action items, draft the 3 posts hiding in there, link them to existing notes. The messy log goes in, structured output comes out, and the vault rewrites itself while you sleep. Part 4 — Agents start living in your notes. People are running weekly reviews, content calendars, even market research as scheduled Claude Code runs over their vault. Your second brain stops being a graveyard of highlights and starts shipping. The honest math: setup takes about 90 minutes, the first week feels like overkill, and by day 30 you're sitting on a system where every note you've written in 5 years is working for you instead of rotting in a folder. Notion needed a server, a subscription and your data on someone else's machine. Obsidian needed a text file and now the text file has an employee.
0:22

Obsidian just became the most dangerous folder on your computer, and Andrej Karpathy predicted it with 1 markdown file. His method is called append-and-review. He described it years ago and almost nobody listened: 1 single note, every thought appended to the top, reviewed on random scrolls. No tags, no folders, no Notion dashboards with 40 linked databases. The problem was always the same the note remembers, but it can't act. That changed the moment people pointed Claude Code at an Obsidian vault. Here's the setup that's quietly spreading: Part 1 — The vault becomes a database. Obsidian stores everything as plain markdown on your disk, which means Claude Code can read it like a codebase. You open a terminal inside the vault folder and your 2,000 notes turn into queryable memory. Part 2 — The CLAUDEmd file becomes the brain stem. One file at the root tells the agent who you are, what you're building, and how your notes are structured. From that point every session starts with full context instead of a blank chat window. Part 3 — Karpathy append log becomes fuel. You dump raw thoughts all day ideas, links, half-sentences. Then 1 command at night: review today's appends, extract action items, draft the 3 posts hiding in there, link them to existing notes. The messy log goes in, structured output comes out, and the vault rewrites itself while you sleep. Part 4 — Agents start living in your notes. People are running weekly reviews, content calendars, even market research as scheduled Claude Code runs over their vault. Your second brain stops being a graveyard of highlights and starts shipping. The honest math: setup takes about 90 minutes, the first week feels like overkill, and by day 30 you're sitting on a system where every note you've written in 5 years is working for you instead of rotting in a folder. Notion needed a server, a subscription and your data on someone else's machine. Obsidian needed a text file and now the text file has an employee.

Spike 1%

58,428 views • 25 days ago

Obsidian + Claude Code is how Andrej Karpathy turns 15 years of notes into a brain that works while he sleeps. The method behind it costs $0 and takes 5 minutes a day and it outlived every productivity app since 2011. Every idea, link, and half-thought gets appended to the top of a single note, with no sorting, no folders, no tags. Once a week he scrolls through, and anything that still matters gets copied back to the top. Weak ideas sink. Strong ideas resurface 5, 10, 20 times and by the 20th pass your brain has already wired them into everything else you know. Repetition as a filter. That's the whole system. Now the 2026 upgrade almost nobody is running: Drop that note into an Obsidian vault and open the folder with Claude Code not the chat app, the terminal agent that reads files. 3 commands change everything: read my last 30 days of notes and find the 3 ideas I keep circling without acting on link every note mentioning this project into a CLAUDE.md of what I actually believe about it draft this week's post from the idea that resurfaced most Claude Code doesn't search your vault it walks it, follows the wikilinks, and hands you the patterns you were too close to see. Karpathy method filters the signal, Obsidian stores it, Claude Code compounds it. One is a habit, one is a folder, one is $20 a month together they're the closest thing to a second brain that thinks back. Most people collect notes for 10 years and never read them once. His notes read him.
1:29

Obsidian + Claude Code is how Andrej Karpathy turns 15 years of notes into a brain that works while he sleeps. The method behind it costs $0 and takes 5 minutes a day and it outlived every productivity app since 2011. Every idea, link, and half-thought gets appended to the top of a single note, with no sorting, no folders, no tags. Once a week he scrolls through, and anything that still matters gets copied back to the top. Weak ideas sink. Strong ideas resurface 5, 10, 20 times and by the 20th pass your brain has already wired them into everything else you know. Repetition as a filter. That's the whole system. Now the 2026 upgrade almost nobody is running: Drop that note into an Obsidian vault and open the folder with Claude Code not the chat app, the terminal agent that reads files. 3 commands change everything: read my last 30 days of notes and find the 3 ideas I keep circling without acting on link every note mentioning this project into a CLAUDE.md of what I actually believe about it draft this week's post from the idea that resurfaced most Claude Code doesn't search your vault it walks it, follows the wikilinks, and hands you the patterns you were too close to see. Karpathy method filters the signal, Obsidian stores it, Claude Code compounds it. One is a habit, one is a folder, one is $20 a month together they're the closest thing to a second brain that thinks back. Most people collect notes for 10 years and never read them once. His notes read him.

Spike 1%

12,346 views • 25 days ago

🚨 THIS 100% FREE GITHUB REPO JUST MADE EVERY AI NOTE-TAKING APP POINTLESS. Drop any source in article, PDF, YouTube transcript, or Journal entry. Claude reads it, links it to everything in your vault, and files it into a connected knowledge graph on your own machine. Most tools save your notes. This one connects them. Every source gets linked to everything you already know. Karpathy described the idea - 15 skills. Four vault methods. Works with Claude Code, Codex, and Gemini. Most people have years of knowledge buried in folders they open twice a year. This turns all of it into a second brain that works while you sleep. MY ARTICLE COVERS THE EXACT METHOD I BUILT TO DO THE SAME THING. Guide below!
0:23

🚨 THIS 100% FREE GITHUB REPO JUST MADE EVERY AI NOTE-TAKING APP POINTLESS. Drop any source in article, PDF, YouTube transcript, or Journal entry. Claude reads it, links it to everything in your vault, and files it into a connected knowledge graph on your own machine. Most tools save your notes. This one connects them. Every source gets linked to everything you already know. Karpathy described the idea - 15 skills. Four vault methods. Works with Claude Code, Codex, and Gemini. Most people have years of knowledge buried in folders they open twice a year. This turns all of it into a second brain that works while you sleep. MY ARTICLE COVERS THE EXACT METHOD I BUILT TO DO THE SAME THING. Guide below!

Kanika

38,795 views • 9 days ago

how to use obsidian + claude code to build a 24/7 personal operating system and build your startup: 1. write everything in markdown (daily notes, projects, beliefs, people, meetings) 2. link your notes together so they mirror how your brain actually thinks. 3. install obsidian cli so claude code can read your entire vault + the relationships. 4. stop reexplaining projects every session. use reference files instead. 5. build custom slash commands: /context → load your full life + work state /trace → see how an idea evolved over months /connect → bridge two domains you’ve been circling /ideas → generate startup ideas from your vault /graduate → promote daily thoughts into real assets 6. keep a strict rule: human writes the vault. agents read it, suggest, execute. 7. let claude aka clode surface patterns you’ve been unconsciously circling for years. 8. delegate from inside your notes. one sentence in obsidian → agent handles the rest. 9. treat writing as leverage.the more you write, the more context your agents have. 10. understand this:markdown files are the oxygen of llms. i really enjoyed seeing how to use obsidian thanks to internetVin vin uses ai like a thinking partner wired into his life’s work. 99.99% of people won’t do this because it requires reflection + setup. but once the vault exists, the agent stops being generic. it starts thinking in your voice. episode is live on The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃 (more there) this one is different. send this tweet to a friend. im still processing how game changer obsidian + claude code is, maybe you too watch
58:56

how to use obsidian + claude code to build a 24/7 personal operating system and build your startup: 1. write everything in markdown (daily notes, projects, beliefs, people, meetings) 2. link your notes together so they mirror how your brain actually thinks. 3. install obsidian cli so claude code can read your entire vault + the relationships. 4. stop reexplaining projects every session. use reference files instead. 5. build custom slash commands: /context → load your full life + work state /trace → see how an idea evolved over months /connect → bridge two domains you’ve been circling /ideas → generate startup ideas from your vault /graduate → promote daily thoughts into real assets 6. keep a strict rule: human writes the vault. agents read it, suggest, execute. 7. let claude aka clode surface patterns you’ve been unconsciously circling for years. 8. delegate from inside your notes. one sentence in obsidian → agent handles the rest. 9. treat writing as leverage.the more you write, the more context your agents have. 10. understand this:markdown files are the oxygen of llms. i really enjoyed seeing how to use obsidian thanks to internetVin vin uses ai like a thinking partner wired into his life’s work. 99.99% of people won’t do this because it requires reflection + setup. but once the vault exists, the agent stops being generic. it starts thinking in your voice. episode is live on The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃 (more there) this one is different. send this tweet to a friend. im still processing how game changer obsidian + claude code is, maybe you too watch

GREG ISENBERG

1,135,576 views • 5 months ago

Obsidian plus Hermes Agent equals a system that thinks, remembers, and runs your life. Works while you sleep. Vault holds the knowledge. Hermes reads it. Claude reasons across it. Outputs land back in the vault as new notes. Every morning brief grounded in your actual projects. Every inbox processed automatically. Every week synthesized without effort. The personal operating system that compounds forever. Read this and Bookmark it now.
0:43

Obsidian plus Hermes Agent equals a system that thinks, remembers, and runs your life. Works while you sleep. Vault holds the knowledge. Hermes reads it. Claude reasons across it. Outputs land back in the vault as new notes. Every morning brief grounded in your actual projects. Every inbox processed automatically. Every week synthesized without effort. The personal operating system that compounds forever. Read this and Bookmark it now.

CyrilXBT

43,403 views • 2 months ago

A 26-year-old plugged Claude Code into his Obsidian vault and the vault started working night shifts. 9,412 notes. 6 years of reading, ideas, half-dead projects. Dead weight until 3 weeks ago. He pointed Claude Code at the vault folder. No plugins. No API glue. The vault is just markdown files, and Claude Code reads files. That's the whole trick everyone misses. Now every night at 2 AM a cron job wakes Claude inside the vault: reads the 40 newest notes links them to old ones he forgot existed writes a daily brief called "what your brain missed" drafts 3 content ideas from collisions between notes Morning 1 it connected a 2021 note on Roman logistics with a 2026 note on AI agent routing. That collision became a post. 214,000 views. Morning 9 it found a SaaS idea buried in a book summary from 2022. He built the landing page the same day. 61 signups before dinner. Morning 17 it flagged that 3 of his abandoned drafts were the same idea written 3 times. He merged them. Best thing he's shipped this year. Cost: $0 in new tools. Obsidian is free. The vault was already there. 6 years he treated his second brain like a warehouse. Turns out it was an employee waiting for a boss.
0:30

A 26-year-old plugged Claude Code into his Obsidian vault and the vault started working night shifts. 9,412 notes. 6 years of reading, ideas, half-dead projects. Dead weight until 3 weeks ago. He pointed Claude Code at the vault folder. No plugins. No API glue. The vault is just markdown files, and Claude Code reads files. That's the whole trick everyone misses. Now every night at 2 AM a cron job wakes Claude inside the vault: reads the 40 newest notes links them to old ones he forgot existed writes a daily brief called "what your brain missed" drafts 3 content ideas from collisions between notes Morning 1 it connected a 2021 note on Roman logistics with a 2026 note on AI agent routing. That collision became a post. 214,000 views. Morning 9 it found a SaaS idea buried in a book summary from 2022. He built the landing page the same day. 61 signups before dinner. Morning 17 it flagged that 3 of his abandoned drafts were the same idea written 3 times. He merged them. Best thing he's shipped this year. Cost: $0 in new tools. Obsidian is free. The vault was already there. 6 years he treated his second brain like a warehouse. Turns out it was an employee waiting for a boss.

Spike 1%

147,951 views • 24 days ago