How I Use Obsidian Claude Code to Run My Life

How I Use Obsidian & Claude Code to Run My Life

In this episode, I share how Obsidian and Claude Code have become the foundation of my personal productivity system. From organizing notes and managing knowledge to automating workflows and tackling complex projects, you'll discover how these AI-powered tools work together to simplify everyday life.

We explore practical strategies for building a second brain, using AI to streamline tasks, and creating a workflow that keeps you focused, organized, and productive. Whether you're a developer, creator, entrepreneur, or AI enthusiast, this episode offers actionable insights to help you get more done with less effort.

🎧 Tune in to learn how combining Obsidian with Claude Code can transform the way you think, plan, and work.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

This is Obsidian. And Obsidian is this little tool that people are using as their second brain. But what's really cool about it is they're pairing it with Claude Code and they're getting crazy results out of it. It's literally a game changer. Now I've been slow to adopt obsidian because to me it's been a little daunting to look at. So I had my friend Vin, and he clearly explains what obsidian is, how to use it with Claude Code, how to set up these commands that really drive the most out of Claude and all the LLMs. And it's an incredible episode, like a really game-changing episode, because I think that people who understand how to use obsidian and how to use Claude Code together, they're going to be able to live happier, healthier, and wealthier lives. Why? Because it gives incredible ideas to you on tap. So I know that the people that stick around to the end of this episode, I think that for a lot of them, it's going to absolutely change how they use AI. And it's going to be a super impactful way because you're going to get better ideas at the right time, the right moment, and it's going to make you happier, healthier, and wealthier. Enjoy the episode. I begged him. I begged this man to come on and to teach us a very specific thing. Vin, by the end of this podcast episode, what are people going to learn?

SPEAKER_00 1:41

I want you to have an understanding of how you can use Cloud Code and Obsidian as a thinking partner. I want you to have an understanding of how you can stop uh having to explain things to agents over and over again and just pass specific files in. And I want you to understand how you can use obsidian and cloud code to notice things about the way you think that you would not have noticed on your own without these tools.

SPEAKER_01 2:04

All right, from your lips to God's ears. Let's get into it.

SPEAKER_00 2:09

Okay, so first is like what is Cloud Code? So Cloud Code is this like agent that you can use in a command line interface. So it's just basically this tool you can use that you can control your computer and you can use it through natural language, right? So I can say make a file or make a file on my desktop that says hello Greg in plain text. And it's gonna go and do this. That's really cool. That's that's something that's that's new, that wasn't possible before. Before this, I had to go to the desktop, open some text editor, and then like create that file, right? And now this file is on my desktop. So I can say open the file. There you go. Hello, Greg. That's crazy, right? Um, what's interesting about this is if you have this agent that can like control and do things on your computer, that means that whatever you can describe to it, like it can start to do. And so when you if you describe a project to it or you get into these long conversations uh with an agent, um it can do more and more complex things. The more information it has, the more complex things it can do. But the problem is that if you have to, let's say, you know, like I write some super long description about a particular project, or I have like an hour conversation with this agent about a particular project, it's like I don't want to have to create a new session to explain that all, I don't want to have to explain that over and over and over again. Um, a lot of people are using like Claude or ChatGPT on the web and it has things like memory, but you you can't like control, you don't know what's in that memory, right? You don't know what it knows and what it doesn't know. And so there needs to be some way of like, you know, passing information into these agents that is easier and faster. And the better information you can give it, and the faster the information you can give it, the more stuff it can do for you, and the better, uh, the faster you can delegate to it. Okay. So now even if I let's say, let's say I had like, you know, let's say I wrote like a big project description here, right? Create a file that describes, you know, a project about uh to-do list app that um is very minimally designed and reads from uh all of my calendar MI messages and um my slack and Slack and interprets it into a task list that of tasks that it thinks that I should do. I don't know, some some idea, right? So now this this is a file that could be on my desktop, and what I can do when I use cloud code is I can reference that file and pass it in whenever I want.

SPEAKER_01 5:08

And why that's important is because it's the context, right? Yes, the whole game is feeding the beast good context.

SPEAKER_00 5:20

Yes, exactly. And I don't want to have to do this over and over again. And and and and when I work on this uh over days, I I'm not gonna remember like what we talked about, right? So I want some kind of file uh that I can like pass in. Oh, sorry, Greg. One sec.

SPEAKER_01 5:36

Yeah, and that's that's sort of the problem that a lot of people are facing with Cloud Code, is like they're using it and then they're saying, well, it's it's okay. It's not like game changing. And the issue is they don't have they're not they're not feeding the right context at the right time.

SPEAKER_00 5:51

Yes, exactly. And so here's so here's like a project description that it wrote, and obviously I can pass this in. And this is like a this is like a general one that I just created, but you you can make these like very complex. You can build them into like robust files, right? Over time. So we know that uh Cloud Code can create files and it can repeat and it can um uh read files, right? So now I can say, let's say I created a new session. So here's a new session, and now I can say, like, I want to work on this project. And I go here, and it's gonna be um to do dash app. Here it is. Oh, now I didn't need to explain the file again. I need I didn't need to explain the project again, right? So it's gonna read this file and it's gonna start like you know, that saved me a lot of time. Great project before diving in, a few questions to scope the first session. So that'll continue. So now what is obsidian? Right? Obsidian is this tool that it's kind of like an interface that sits on top of um uh a collection of markdown files, right? So here, like this is reading a markdown file, how I use obsidian story development. Right. Um, I have uh daily notes. This is my daily notes. This is a this is also um a markdown file. I should do my own fundamental analysis into thing uh into how things stay pure when they grow and become more mainstream, right? This is just a file that I have. I have um, you know, like a file on Greg Eisenberg that I haven't put any.

SPEAKER_01 7:24

That's weird that's weird. Yeah, that's pretty weird.

SPEAKER_00 7:27

And so I make files like notes of things that I'm learning from people and stuff like that too. So I have different um files for everything, right? And the interesting thing that makes a vault, which is obsidian, what obsidian interacts with, this whole thing is called a vault. What makes it different than a folder is that obsidian is not only interacting with just like a you know a folder of files, um, but what it does is it also allows you to make inter uh to connect relationships between files. So I can say today I am on um a podcast with Greg Eisenberg. Now this file is linked to that Greg Eisenberg file. Super interesting, super interesting. And so when people like like like people, uh there's a lot of people who really, really like using Obsidian and tools like Obsidian because of this ability to form interrelationships. This is unique to just having a folder. A folder on your computer cannot show these interrelationships, and so it gets really interesting when you start to um keep making these like interrelationships over time, right? And so what happens, here's a little visualization. And so in that here, these are each one of these circles is a file, and in and it's it's showing how it's like connected to all of these other files where I've written things about. So here's like personal agent infrastructure, right? And so I could look, you know, and I guess I should also add just kind of a comment on this and what was difficult about doing this demo. There's like so much personal information in here because this is like my personal thing. So I don't even know like what's gonna show up on the screen here, right? Um, but that's part of doing demos like this, which is which are kind of weird and interesting. But you could see personal agent infrastructure, it links to like agentic AI, there's like a link here to Telegram, there's a link here to like Toby, uh the founder of Shopify, there's a link to like presence log, ClaudeBot, you know, and then here's like I I have a podcast too called The Other Stuff, and like you'd see I'm obviously doing a lot of like thinking about that a lot, right? And so I can also let's say if I go to Greg Eisenberg and I go to local graph, so here's like all the times I've written about Greg Eisenberg, right? Notes on time constraints, how I use obsidian, which is just kind of interesting. Um, so if I'm listening to I love you too, Vin.

SPEAKER_01 9:56

I love you too.

SPEAKER_00 9:57

If I'm listening to a show and I'm picking up different patterns, I can I can reference that back to Greg. So that's really interesting. But here's the thing the reason why people love obsidian is because of these interrelationships. The idea that you could open a file and then, you know, I just open this file and then I'm like, oh, interesting. I mentioned Greg Eisenberg. I can click that and it goes to that file. That's interesting, right? It shows it works more to where uh it works more like the way your brain works. Your brain connects these patterns all the time. Here's yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:29

So I see why it's interesting, but how does this get me better output?

SPEAKER_00 10:36

Exactly, yeah. So the next thing is Obsidian released this new tool called Obsidian CLI. And what that allows you to do is it allows you to use Claud Code and it can go and it can read all of the files in your Obsidian vault, which is a folder of text files. But with the Obsidian CLI, it can give Claud Code not only those files that it can read and access, but it can also give Claud Code information about the interrelationships of those files. So you can see, so Cloud Code can see that, oh, this file is connected to this file and this file and this file. And that gets very interesting in terms of what Cloud Code can understand about you and what Cloud Code can uh understand about uh all of the relationships between the things that you're working on. It can start to surface patterns about what you're thinking about that you are not seeing for yourself. Some idea that you might have been writing about for a year in this vault, it could be a latent idea and it can just immediately say, like, hey, did you know that you've been writing about this same pattern in startups or in this particular project you're working on in every single note you're making across these different domains? And and seeing that for the first time can be like a huge light bulb effect. It can cause like huge progressions in your learning and your understanding and your point of view on the world, but also in what you're working on. Um, so I've written out, I wanted to demonstrate how that actually works in terms of how I can pass information into an agent that would be impossible without obsidian and clawed code. So here's some commands that I have that I use. And I don't want you to be afraid of like all this stuff. I know this can look intense, but um here here's what um here's what I've got some commands. And this is just terminal that I've created, and I'm running it in obsidian. You don't need to use this, you can just also do this in your own terminal session on in whatever tool you want. But I put it in obsidian because I want to see it all together and I wanted to show you the ways in which you can like integrate and customize this environment. So here's a cool thing. So context slash context. Load full context about my life, work, and current state. Reads context files, daily notes, and follows backlinks to build a complete picture. So I'll just show you that right here. So like let's say I open a new session in in uh in Claude, just on my desktop, and now it's like I'm about to work on something, but before I work on it, I can just type context demo. Now it's gonna read a whole bunch of files about where I'm currently at, done. Like I've already preloaded, I've already preloaded in all this context now. So you can see it's gonna start reading all these files. It's reading a README, it's reading context about new, which is a media company that I'm working on. It's reading about other stuff, it's reading my personal, the other stuff is my show. It's reading a personal workflow context. And so I don't have to worry about it not knowing the key information that I want it to know. I just did that one command and now it's gonna get all that information done. So I can use slash today, which is a morning review. It pulls calendar, tasks, iMessages in the past week of daily notes in a pr into a prioritized plan for the day. Why does this matter? Well, okay, sure. You can set up an agent and give it access to your calendar and your tasks and iMessages and things like that, but it's miss, it's that's that doesn't have all of the information about what you're thinking about and why. If I'm writing daily notes about some particular technology or project or thing that I'm interested in, does my calendar reflect actively, like does it match the subjects I'm actually writing about? If an agent has that context, you can it can it can uh more effectively give you um information about what you should do or not do, or and it can more effectively make decisions on what should be in your calendar or not in your calendar. Here's another one slash closed day. End of day processing extracts action items, surfaces, vault connections, checks, confidence markers need to be updating. So I have a bunch of hypotheses that I think about and I give them a confidence rating. This is an idea I'm working on, I feel very solid about it. Here's another idea I'm working on, I'm not sure about it. So these are like um daily operations things. But this is what I use obsidian for the most, which is thinking tools. I really, really, really like working with LLMs as a thinking partner. It's my favorite way of using LLMs. I know people like to use uh agents and LLMs to build things, but I really like using them to think alongside me and build when I feel like you know I really have a novel way of viewing things. So let's see here. Um so ghost here's a here's a command I have. It answers a question the way I would. It builds a voice voice profile from the vault, writes in that voice, then evaluates the fidelity. So I can just say, what do I think of AI? And I'm gonna show you this. Challenge topic. It pressure tests current beliefs using the vault's own history, finds contradictions, counter evidence, and shifts in thinking. Why does that matter? Well, if I want to make sure that I'm continually developing as a human being and as a as a as in my skills, I want to make sure that you know the POV I have isn't overly biased or limited. So this can challenge me. Emerge. Surface ideas, the vault implies, but never states. Conclusions from scattered premises, unnamed patterns, unarticulated directions. This is super, super useful because a lot of times, you know, I can be stuck just surfacing ideas in a in um in a lot of different ways, like for years. And just having someone say a simple thing to me that just says, hey, this is just naming the idea. Hey, did you know that you keep circling around this pattern? Huge breakthroughs, uh slash drift. It compares it compares my stated attention intentions against actual behavior over 30 to 60 days, surfaces what I am avoiding. Ideas, people on this podcast, the listeners will probably like this one. Deep 30-day vault scan with cross-domain pattern detection and graph analysis to generate generate ideas across all domains. This gives me um not just ideas on like things I should work on, like it gives me ideas for tools and things like this, but it also gives me ideas on like films I should watch, products I should buy, again, all influenced by like like things I'm writing about in my vault. Um trace tracks how an idea has evolved over time across the vault. So let's see some of this stuff. The trace demo. So I did this one already, and the way this would work is I just like create a tab here, and I could just be like, Claude, trace. And I had to create demo versions of all of these um commands because of how much personal information is in my vault, but still I don't even know, like, I I can't even control what is gonna show up on the screen.

SPEAKER_01 17:38

And I I have just a dumb question. Like, all those commands that we saw, is that commands that you created, or is that what Obsidian created?

SPEAKER_00 17:48

That those are commands that I created. And um you can create them very easily by just asking Cloud Code to create a specific command.

SPEAKER_01 17:57

Um we can include I'll include in the show notes and in the description just like a link where people can click to get access to some of Vin's uh skills, if that's if that's yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_00 18:13

Totally. Yeah. So you can see here what I did was I just type / trace demo. Demo is just because I'm showing this publicly, how I use Obsidian. And so what this does is it tracks my uh the way I've developed and um the way I've navigated this idea through my vault. So I have an example here, it's really interesting. So here I did it and I and I and I let it run. And what it's doing is as it says, like, I'll trace how your relationship with obsidian has evolved. Let me start by building a vocabulary map and searching across a vault. So it when you have obsc like so now it starts going through the vault, reading all of these different files, and it can see all of the files that are connected using the obsidian CLI. This is a lot, man. This is this is something that I would never be able to do on my own. And to read all of these files, to know what how they're interconnected with each other, this is just not possible for me to do as a human being. And then it spits this out. I now have everything I need to construct this trace. Here's the full evolution. Trace, how I use obsidian. First appeared January 11th, 2025. Time span 13 months. That's in relation to this vault specifically, meaning all the files in here. It says, pre-Vaults, December 2024. The essay, How I Take Notes in the West End of Toronto, dated December 1st, 2024, describes a complete system where obsidian plays no role at all. The system is audio dumps via Mac Whisper, LLM dialog loops, Canopia for spatial mapping, physical notebooks for cognitive friction, future land for tracking, arena for fragments, the pipeline is capture, process, crystallization. This is the baseline, obsidian is not in the picture. Discovery and skepticism, January to May 2025. The first daily note in the vault, raw excitement mixed with uncertainty. I could probably drop transcriptions in here too as a way of storing them. The current theory is that in terms of note taking, bidirectional linking is not that useful, but I don't know. Then it says the chosen tool. Originally I was back ringing, it says um here, how I use obsidian note, a pivotal realization about backlinking. Originally, I was backlinking to general terms, podcasts or physical fitness or filmmaking. I'm realizing it's not the most useful way to use obsidian. The most important thing to do is to create notes for each of my patterns, theories, projects, or perspectives and get them documented out of my head and then link to those notes. So it's just it's just like pulling from things I've written, and it's forming this historical, this history of this concept. And I could do this with anything. I can do this with like startups, I can do this with a particular project, with foods, my relationships, like a hobby, anything, right? And then phase four, January 2026, a month of explosive building. Everything still requires, and then like everything still requires me to actively prompt and manage each section session. The next unlocked is figuring out how to get agents tasks to run automatically. The friction is no longer with obsidian itself, but with the boundary between the vault and agent execution. So you can see I'm really pushing myself, right? And it's cool. This is a this is a very useful thing for me to understand how my um use of this tool is evolving. And it's just, I think it's just absurd that I can just be making notes and then about all of these different things through my life, like even as a parent, I I can I can like reflect on the different things I'm learning. I just think this is insane that an uh a computer can have this much information about me and surface these patterns. I would not be able to do this on my own and this fast. And what a great tool it is for me. Like, like I can just like now write in here and I'm you know, as I'm thinking about things, and it gives me ideas, right? About um my life and the projects that I'm working on. So I can say, you know, it's interesting the way that my relationship with Obsidian has evolved over time. It makes me think a lot about the way in which my relationship with computers has evolved over time since I was a kid up to now. It's interesting how these things just happen and compound over time and we don't really realize it. So it's just like a no, right? It's an idea. So that's an example of something.

SPEAKER_01 22:52

So I think a part of getting good at obsidian sounds like reflect you know, inserting reflection into your everyday life. Because a lot of people, you know, we're moving from meeting to meeting, we're busy, we're parents. Um, you know, we grow up and we of course write things down in notebooks and stuff like that. But I feel like as we get older, we actually write and reflect less and less.

SPEAKER_00 23:19

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 23:20

Uh you know, how how do you how have you been able to insert reflection into your life?