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Everyone talks about building a second brain. 450 notes. 3 years of curation. Books, podcasts, articles, videos. I built a section of my site where an agent forces connections between ideas and writes exploratory essays from it. Your notes are dead if they sit in folders.

Noah Zender

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39,117 views • 5 months ago •via X (Twitter)

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Most people start Obsidian the wrong way. They import 10,000 notes. Build 50 folders. Install 20 plugins. Then quit a week later. If I had to restart Obsidian today, I’d do the opposite: • Start with 5 meaningful notes • Create ZERO folders • Ignore plugins completely • Focus only on connecting ideas That’s the real unlock. Obsidian isn’t a notes app. It’s a personal internet for your mind. The magic happens when you use one simple prompt: “This reminds me of…” A quote links to a book. A book links to a song. A song links to a memory. A memory links to an insight. That’s how real thinking compounds. The goal isn’t collecting information. It’s building connections your brain can return to later. AI can summarize notes. But only YOU can create meaningful links between ideas. That’s where the leverage is. Follow Dami-Defi for more AI alpha.

Most people start Obsidian the wrong way. They import 10,000 notes. Build 50 folders. Install 20 plugins. Then quit a week later. If I had to restart Obsidian today, I’d do the opposite: • Start with 5 meaningful notes • Create ZERO folders • Ignore plugins completely • Focus only on connecting ideas That’s the real unlock. Obsidian isn’t a notes app. It’s a personal internet for your mind. The magic happens when you use one simple prompt: “This reminds me of…” A quote links to a book. A book links to a song. A song links to a memory. A memory links to an insight. That’s how real thinking compounds. The goal isn’t collecting information. It’s building connections your brain can return to later. AI can summarize notes. But only YOU can create meaningful links between ideas. That’s where the leverage is. Follow Dami-Defi for more AI alpha.

Dami-Defi

71,024 views • 2 months ago

This guy opened Obsidian 90 days ago with 200 isolated notes rotting in folders he had not opened in 6 months. He just started linking. One note at a time. One connection at a time. Every single day. Today he has 847 notes and over 2,300 connections between them. The graph does not look like folders. It looks like a brain. And it shows him what he actually thinks about, not what he assumed he cared about. This is exactly why I built my Web Clipper workflow around connection and not storage. If you want to see how I turn heavy books and dense data into actual insights inside Obsidian, I wrote about my 6 best Web Clipper templates that I use daily. Link in the post. He is not smarter than he was 90 days ago. He just stopped filing and started linking. His notes are not stored. They are alive. If you have been using Obsidian as a glorified Google Drive folder, like and bookmark this. 90 days is all it takes.

This guy opened Obsidian 90 days ago with 200 isolated notes rotting in folders he had not opened in 6 months. He just started linking. One note at a time. One connection at a time. Every single day. Today he has 847 notes and over 2,300 connections between them. The graph does not look like folders. It looks like a brain. And it shows him what he actually thinks about, not what he assumed he cared about. This is exactly why I built my Web Clipper workflow around connection and not storage. If you want to see how I turn heavy books and dense data into actual insights inside Obsidian, I wrote about my 6 best Web Clipper templates that I use daily. Link in the post. He is not smarter than he was 90 days ago. He just stopped filing and started linking. His notes are not stored. They are alive. If you have been using Obsidian as a glorified Google Drive folder, like and bookmark this. 90 days is all it takes.

Kanika

33,755 views • 2 months ago

This guy took notes in Obsidian every single day for 1 full year. 365 days. No breaks or skipped weeks. He started with 0 notes and 0 connections. Just an empty vault and a habit he was not sure would stick. His second brain remembered everything. This is exactly the problem I was trying to solve when I built my Web Clipper templates. Most people clip articles and books into Obsidian and never touch them again. I spent 4 months testing 6 templates on everything from dense research papers to 500 page books until I found what actually turns captured information into connected thinking. Full breakdown in my article👇

This guy took notes in Obsidian every single day for 1 full year. 365 days. No breaks or skipped weeks. He started with 0 notes and 0 connections. Just an empty vault and a habit he was not sure would stick. His second brain remembered everything. This is exactly the problem I was trying to solve when I built my Web Clipper templates. Most people clip articles and books into Obsidian and never touch them again. I spent 4 months testing 6 templates on everything from dense research papers to 500 page books until I found what actually turns captured information into connected thinking. Full breakdown in my article👇

Kanika

48,761 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.

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%

146,385 views • 15 days ago

This is Farzapedia. I had an LLM take 2,500 entries from my diary, Apple Notes, and some iMessage convos to create a personal Wikipedia for me. It made 400 detailed articles for my friends, my startups, research areas, and even my favorite animes and their impact on me complete with backlinks. But, this Wiki was not built for me! I built it for my agent! The structure of the wiki files and how it's all backlinked is very easily crawlable by any agent + makes it a truly useful knowledge base. I can spin up Claude Code on the wiki and starting at index.md (a catalog of all my articles) the agent does a really good job at drilling into the specific pages on my wiki it needs context on when I have a query. For example, when trying to cook up a new landing page I may ask: "I'm trying to design this landing page for a new idea I have. Please look into the images and films that inspired me recently and give me ideas for new copy and aesthetics". In my diary I kept track of everything from: learnings, people, inspo, interesting links, images. So the agent reads my wiki and pulls up my "Philosophy" articles from notes on a Studio Ghibli documentary, "Competitor" articles with YC companies whose landing pages I screenshotted, and pics of 1970s Beatles merch I saved years ago. And it delivers a great answer. I built a similar system to this a year ago with RAG but it was ass. A knowledge base that lets an agent find what it needs via a file system it actually understands just works better. The most magical thing now is as I add new things to my wiki (articles, images of inspo, meeting notes) the system will likely update 2-3 different articles where it feels that context belongs, or, just creates a new article. It's like this super genius librarian for your brain that's always filing stuff for your perfectly and also let's you easily query the knowledge for tasks useful to you (ex. design, product, writing, etc) and it never gets tired. I might spend next week productizing this, if that's of interest to you DM me + tell me your usecase!

This is Farzapedia. I had an LLM take 2,500 entries from my diary, Apple Notes, and some iMessage convos to create a personal Wikipedia for me. It made 400 detailed articles for my friends, my startups, research areas, and even my favorite animes and their impact on me complete with backlinks. But, this Wiki was not built for me! I built it for my agent! The structure of the wiki files and how it's all backlinked is very easily crawlable by any agent + makes it a truly useful knowledge base. I can spin up Claude Code on the wiki and starting at index.md (a catalog of all my articles) the agent does a really good job at drilling into the specific pages on my wiki it needs context on when I have a query. For example, when trying to cook up a new landing page I may ask: "I'm trying to design this landing page for a new idea I have. Please look into the images and films that inspired me recently and give me ideas for new copy and aesthetics". In my diary I kept track of everything from: learnings, people, inspo, interesting links, images. So the agent reads my wiki and pulls up my "Philosophy" articles from notes on a Studio Ghibli documentary, "Competitor" articles with YC companies whose landing pages I screenshotted, and pics of 1970s Beatles merch I saved years ago. And it delivers a great answer. I built a similar system to this a year ago with RAG but it was ass. A knowledge base that lets an agent find what it needs via a file system it actually understands just works better. The most magical thing now is as I add new things to my wiki (articles, images of inspo, meeting notes) the system will likely update 2-3 different articles where it feels that context belongs, or, just creates a new article. It's like this super genius librarian for your brain that's always filing stuff for your perfectly and also let's you easily query the knowledge for tasks useful to you (ex. design, product, writing, etc) and it never gets tired. I might spend next week productizing this, if that's of interest to you DM me + tell me your usecase!

Farza 🇵🇰🇺🇸

2,085,439 views • 4 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.

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

62,978 views • 18 days ago

Monologue Notes is here. Dictation is for when you know where the words are going. A Slack message. An email. A prompt to Claude. But some of your best thinking doesn’t have a destination yet. It happens on walks, on calls, in 30-minute brain dumps, and in half-formed ideas you’d usually lose. Notes is for that kind of thinking. Hit record, let the ideas flow, and turn the transcript into something useful later. For builders. Makers. Doers.

Monologue Notes is here. Dictation is for when you know where the words are going. A Slack message. An email. A prompt to Claude. But some of your best thinking doesn’t have a destination yet. It happens on walks, on calls, in 30-minute brain dumps, and in half-formed ideas you’d usually lose. Notes is for that kind of thinking. Hit record, let the ideas flow, and turn the transcript into something useful later. For builders. Makers. Doers.

Monologue

53,541 views • 3 months ago

This is super cool! I wanted to make my own graph visualization of my Readwise notes, but with a timeline of when they were added. It shows the list form on the right side and the semantic links between the notes in the graph.

This is super cool! I wanted to make my own graph visualization of my Readwise notes, but with a timeline of when they were added. It shows the list form on the right side and the semantic links between the notes in the graph.

timour kosters

17,806 views • 4 months 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.

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%

12,291 views • 15 days ago

Just spent 2 days hacking on a new app idea: SuperNote → an AI-powered note-taking app that lets you: ✅ Summarize PDFs, Audio, YouTube videos into notes ✅ Organize notes in custom folders (with moods 🌈) ✅ Instantly generate AI notes from transcripts ✅ Write + edit in a clean, minimal editor Honestly, I wasn’t planning to build this. It started as a quick experiment and snowballed. Sometimes you need to ship an MVP fast and see what happens. For my fellow indie hackers: You don’t need weeks/months You don’t need a huge team You just need one idea and a weekend of focus. 🔥 Built this in 2 days using: 🛠 Flutter 🛠 Supabase 🛠 OpenAI Now, I am thinking of turning it into a full product. If you're building similar AI-first tools. DM me!

Just spent 2 days hacking on a new app idea: SuperNote → an AI-powered note-taking app that lets you: ✅ Summarize PDFs, Audio, YouTube videos into notes ✅ Organize notes in custom folders (with moods 🌈) ✅ Instantly generate AI notes from transcripts ✅ Write + edit in a clean, minimal editor Honestly, I wasn’t planning to build this. It started as a quick experiment and snowballed. Sometimes you need to ship an MVP fast and see what happens. For my fellow indie hackers: You don’t need weeks/months You don’t need a huge team You just need one idea and a weekend of focus. 🔥 Built this in 2 days using: 🛠 Flutter 🛠 Supabase 🛠 OpenAI Now, I am thinking of turning it into a full product. If you're building similar AI-first tools. DM me!

Chizi

47,296 views • 1 year 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

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 • 1 month ago

Tiago Forte has pioneered the concept of a Second Brain. As the author of two books, he's learned that quantity and quality aren't opposing forces. Here's what else he's taught me about writing: 1. The brain is for having ideas, not storing them. Write stuff down. 2. If you really want to learn something, don't just consume information. Create something about it. 3. Note-taking is a form of time-travel. You don’t just take notes to remember ideas. You also take notes to remember experiences. Reading your notes takes you back to a different state of consciousness. Note-taking is a rebellion against the entropy of memory. 4. Save only the best notes: Don't hoard information. Save only the top 5-10% of your ideas. That way, you can trust that everything in your note-taking system is high-quality. 5. Tiago’s dad is an artist who taught him an important lesson: the energy to create art can dissipate in small, invisible ways if you let it. Set up a structure where you have the peace of mind and the bandwidth to do art. 6. The ultimate goal of note-taking is to improve your ideas. Too many people treat note-taking as an end in itself. But the goal of note-taking isn’t to save information. It’s to have ideas you wouldn’t have had otherwise. To be smarter, faster, and more creative. 7. Link notes together. Organize your ideas by topic, not by source. As you browse your note-taking system, consider the serendipity you want to create for your future self. For example, if you read two books about a topic, link those notes together. 8. In school, we’re taught to research before we write. Do the opposite. Compile notes over time. Then, once you have an idea, start writing immediately — right when you have an epiphany. Start researching after you've written a draft. 9. Create evergreen notes. Like a good investment, the benefits of your note-taking system should compound in value. Save ideas that will stay relevant for many years. Read the classics, skip the news. 10. Tiago publicly tested every idea in his book. For most, the internet is a blackhole of distraction. But it can instead be used as a place to do low-stakes experiments before you go all in. 11. The more expensive the location for a writer's retreat, the more it forces you to be productive. 12. "Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work." — Gustave Flaubert, one of Tiago's favorite quotes. 13. The less formal and “official” a software program feels, the better Tiago writes. And he believes some of the best turns of phrase come out in messaging apps with friends. Stuck on something? Close the word doc and text a friend about it. 14. Every time you compress an idea, you make it more accessible. But you also lose context, depth, and nuance. 15. The ultimate test of how well you understand something is how clearly you can explain it in writing — clear writers are clear thinkers. 16. Twitter can help too. Stuck on a paragraph while writing your book? Well, send a tweet about it. If the idea resonates, bring it into your book. 17. Too many choices can cloud our creative process. The key to making progress is knowing when to take in new information and when to shut off all sources of distraction. Divergence and Convergence. 18. Anything you might want to accomplish—executing a project at work, getting a new job, learning a new skill, starting a business—requires finding and putting to use the right information. 19. Instead of working in “Heavy Lifts,” you can work in “Slow Burns.” Taking notes makes you less dependent on those long blocks of creative time you need when you have to complete creative projects in a single sitting. 20. Tiago: “If I could leave you with one last bit of advice, it is to chase what excites you.” 21. A bonus: “Run after your obsessions with everything you have. Just be sure to take notes along the way.” I've shared the full conversation with Tiago Forte here. If you'd rather listen on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple, check out the replies below.

Tiago Forte has pioneered the concept of a Second Brain. As the author of two books, he's learned that quantity and quality aren't opposing forces. Here's what else he's taught me about writing: 1. The brain is for having ideas, not storing them. Write stuff down. 2. If you really want to learn something, don't just consume information. Create something about it. 3. Note-taking is a form of time-travel. You don’t just take notes to remember ideas. You also take notes to remember experiences. Reading your notes takes you back to a different state of consciousness. Note-taking is a rebellion against the entropy of memory. 4. Save only the best notes: Don't hoard information. Save only the top 5-10% of your ideas. That way, you can trust that everything in your note-taking system is high-quality. 5. Tiago’s dad is an artist who taught him an important lesson: the energy to create art can dissipate in small, invisible ways if you let it. Set up a structure where you have the peace of mind and the bandwidth to do art. 6. The ultimate goal of note-taking is to improve your ideas. Too many people treat note-taking as an end in itself. But the goal of note-taking isn’t to save information. It’s to have ideas you wouldn’t have had otherwise. To be smarter, faster, and more creative. 7. Link notes together. Organize your ideas by topic, not by source. As you browse your note-taking system, consider the serendipity you want to create for your future self. For example, if you read two books about a topic, link those notes together. 8. In school, we’re taught to research before we write. Do the opposite. Compile notes over time. Then, once you have an idea, start writing immediately — right when you have an epiphany. Start researching after you've written a draft. 9. Create evergreen notes. Like a good investment, the benefits of your note-taking system should compound in value. Save ideas that will stay relevant for many years. Read the classics, skip the news. 10. Tiago publicly tested every idea in his book. For most, the internet is a blackhole of distraction. But it can instead be used as a place to do low-stakes experiments before you go all in. 11. The more expensive the location for a writer's retreat, the more it forces you to be productive. 12. "Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work." — Gustave Flaubert, one of Tiago's favorite quotes. 13. The less formal and “official” a software program feels, the better Tiago writes. And he believes some of the best turns of phrase come out in messaging apps with friends. Stuck on something? Close the word doc and text a friend about it. 14. Every time you compress an idea, you make it more accessible. But you also lose context, depth, and nuance. 15. The ultimate test of how well you understand something is how clearly you can explain it in writing — clear writers are clear thinkers. 16. Twitter can help too. Stuck on a paragraph while writing your book? Well, send a tweet about it. If the idea resonates, bring it into your book. 17. Too many choices can cloud our creative process. The key to making progress is knowing when to take in new information and when to shut off all sources of distraction. Divergence and Convergence. 18. Anything you might want to accomplish—executing a project at work, getting a new job, learning a new skill, starting a business—requires finding and putting to use the right information. 19. Instead of working in “Heavy Lifts,” you can work in “Slow Burns.” Taking notes makes you less dependent on those long blocks of creative time you need when you have to complete creative projects in a single sitting. 20. Tiago: “If I could leave you with one last bit of advice, it is to chase what excites you.” 21. A bonus: “Run after your obsessions with everything you have. Just be sure to take notes along the way.” I've shared the full conversation with Tiago Forte here. If you'd rather listen on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple, check out the replies below.

David Perell

101,346 views • 2 years ago

I turned a rejected conference talk into an essay about my journey into the wild world of "just ship your ideas." I call it Permissionless Building. Would mean a ton if you checked it out.

I turned a rejected conference talk into an essay about my journey into the wild world of "just ship your ideas." I call it Permissionless Building. Would mean a ton if you checked it out.

Kris Puckett

19,166 views • 3 months ago

we just made it possible to upload your mind to the internet. Proxi is a living archive of your worldview. It ingests your public and private data(notes, articles, podcasts, journals) to reconstruct your thought patterns, contradictions and your unique lens into the world. You could interrogate how a founder thinks about distribution. get advice from a trader about your own thesis. stress test your ideas with people you admire. We’re opening it up today. clone yourself. talk to others. poke at worldviews you'd never get access to. try it here: [Link Below⬇️]

we just made it possible to upload your mind to the internet. Proxi is a living archive of your worldview. It ingests your public and private data(notes, articles, podcasts, journals) to reconstruct your thought patterns, contradictions and your unique lens into the world. You could interrogate how a founder thinks about distribution. get advice from a trader about your own thesis. stress test your ideas with people you admire. We’re opening it up today. clone yourself. talk to others. poke at worldviews you'd never get access to. try it here: [Link Below⬇️]

Celestine

20,433 views • 5 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.

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

336,969 views • 1 month ago

A developer pointed Claude Code at a 6,200-note Obsidian vault and let it run overnight. The vault was 4 years of markdown. Meeting notes, half-ideas, book highlights. Dead weight. He hadn't opened 90% of it since 2022. He typed one line into the terminal. "Read everything. Find what I forgot." Then he went to bed. By 7 AM, Claude Code had touched all 6,200 files. It wrote 3 new notes. The first mapped 14 ideas scattered across 3 years into one product. He'd never seen they connected. The second listed 22 promises he'd made in old meeting notes and never kept. The third was a full essay. Stitched from 40 fragments. In his own phrasing. He hadn't written a note in 8 months. The vault had been writing itself the whole time. He just couldn't read his own handwriting at scale. Now Claude Code opens the vault every morning at 6:00. It links new notes to old ones. It flags contradictions. It drafts. 2 tools. 1 folder of plain text. No app, no cloud, no subscription. He stopped taking notes to remember them. He takes them now to be read back.

A developer pointed Claude Code at a 6,200-note Obsidian vault and let it run overnight. The vault was 4 years of markdown. Meeting notes, half-ideas, book highlights. Dead weight. He hadn't opened 90% of it since 2022. He typed one line into the terminal. "Read everything. Find what I forgot." Then he went to bed. By 7 AM, Claude Code had touched all 6,200 files. It wrote 3 new notes. The first mapped 14 ideas scattered across 3 years into one product. He'd never seen they connected. The second listed 22 promises he'd made in old meeting notes and never kept. The third was a full essay. Stitched from 40 fragments. In his own phrasing. He hadn't written a note in 8 months. The vault had been writing itself the whole time. He just couldn't read his own handwriting at scale. Now Claude Code opens the vault every morning at 6:00. It links new notes to old ones. It flags contradictions. It drafts. 2 tools. 1 folder of plain text. No app, no cloud, no subscription. He stopped taking notes to remember them. He takes them now to be read back.

Spike 1%

18,613 views • 14 days ago

THIS GUY BUILT A GOD-MODE SECOND BRAIN IN 3 STEPS THAT GETS SMARTER EVERY SINGLE DAY AND 10X HIS RESEARCH! Everyone hoards notes they never reopen, but he turned the dead pile into a brain that actually reads itself back, in three steps: > download Obsidian, make a vault, and point Claude Code at the folder > create two folders inside, raw-sources for everything you dump in and wiki where Claude writes the organized version, then drop in Andrej Karpathy's prompt > throw in every article, book note, meeting transcript and piece of research you ever saved and forgot Then you stop searching and start asking the wiki, "what are the gaps in my knowledge", "write me a briefing on this topic", and Claude pulls from your whole vault and answers with citations. Everyone copies the folders, but the part that actually matters is what happens next, every answer gets written back into the wiki and a weekly health check hunts for contradictions and outdated info, so it is not storage you query, it is a brain that compounds every day you use it. The full step by step guide with the Karpathy prompt and the .md files is in the article below.👇 P.S. you can send this article straight to your Claude to get the full context

THIS GUY BUILT A GOD-MODE SECOND BRAIN IN 3 STEPS THAT GETS SMARTER EVERY SINGLE DAY AND 10X HIS RESEARCH! Everyone hoards notes they never reopen, but he turned the dead pile into a brain that actually reads itself back, in three steps: > download Obsidian, make a vault, and point Claude Code at the folder > create two folders inside, raw-sources for everything you dump in and wiki where Claude writes the organized version, then drop in Andrej Karpathy's prompt > throw in every article, book note, meeting transcript and piece of research you ever saved and forgot Then you stop searching and start asking the wiki, "what are the gaps in my knowledge", "write me a briefing on this topic", and Claude pulls from your whole vault and answers with citations. Everyone copies the folders, but the part that actually matters is what happens next, every answer gets written back into the wiki and a weekly health check hunts for contradictions and outdated info, so it is not storage you query, it is a brain that compounds every day you use it. The full step by step guide with the Karpathy prompt and the .md files is in the article below.👇 P.S. you can send this article straight to your Claude to get the full context

Miraqle

15,128 views • 1 month 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.

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 • 16 days ago