Obsidian + Claude Code: How to Build an AI-Powered Life System

Imagine having a personal assistant who can read every note you've ever taken, organize your projects while you sleep, and create daily summaries without being asked twice. That's what happens when you combine Obsidian — a powerful local-first notes app — with Claude Code — an AI agent that can read and write files on your computer.

This isn't science fiction. Thousands of people are already running this exact setup, and it's transforming how they manage everything from daily journals to complex research projects. The best part? Your notes never leave your computer (with some caveats we'll cover), and the whole system runs on plain text files you'll own forever.

In this guide, we'll break everything down from scratch — what these tools are, why they're powerful together, and exactly how to set them up. Whether you've never heard of Obsidian or you're already a note-taking veteran wondering how AI fits in, this guide has you covered.

What is Obsidian? (A Beginner's Guide)

Think of Obsidian as a supercharged notebook that lives on your computer. Instead of writing notes in a cloud app like Google Docs or Notion, Obsidian stores everything as simple text files (called Markdown files) in a folder on your machine.

Here's why that matters:

• You own your notes forever. They're just text files. If Obsidian disappears tomorrow, your notes still work in any text editor. No vendor lock-in, no subscription required to access your own thoughts.
• It's blazing fast. Because everything is local, there's no loading spinner, no "syncing..." message. Open a note and it's just there.
• Notes link to each other. This is Obsidian's superpower. You can link any note to any other note using [[double brackets]]. Over time, you build a web of connected ideas — a "knowledge graph" — that mirrors how your brain actually works.
• Plugins make it infinitely extensible. With over 2,000 community plugins, Obsidian can become a task manager, a calendar, a writing studio, a research tool, or all of the above.

The Knowledge Graph

Obsidian's graph view is often the "aha moment" for new users. Imagine looking at a visual map of every idea you've ever written down, with lines connecting related concepts. That meeting note from January? It links to your project plan, which links to a research paper, which links to a blog draft. Obsidian shows you these connections visually, often revealing patterns you didn't know existed.

The Vault

In Obsidian, your collection of notes is called a "vault." It's just a folder on your computer. Inside that folder are .md files (your notes) organized however you like — in subfolders, flat, or any structure that makes sense to you. This simplicity is what makes the Claude Code integration so powerful: Claude can read and write to this folder just like any other program on your computer.

What is Claude Code? (A Beginner's Guide)

You may have heard of ChatGPT or Claude — AI chatbots you talk to in a browser. Claude Code is different. It's an AI assistant that runs directly on your computer, in a terminal window (that black screen with text that programmers use).

Here's what makes Claude Code special:

• It can read your files. Point it at a folder and it can see everything inside — your notes, your code, your documents.
• It can write and edit files. Ask it to create a new note, reorganize a folder, or update 50 files at once — it just does it.
• It remembers your preferences. Through a file called CLAUDE.md, you can teach it your personal rules, templates, and workflows. It loads these instructions every time you start a conversation.
• It's agentic. Unlike a chatbot that just answers questions, Claude Code can take actions — create files, run scripts, search through your notes, and chain multiple steps together.

Claude Code vs. Regular Claude

Why Combine Them? The "Second Brain + AI Agent" Concept

Here's the magic: Obsidian stores your knowledge as plain text files. Claude Code can read, write, and manipulate plain text files. Put them together and your notes app becomes intelligent.

The concept of a "second brain" — an external system that captures and organizes your thoughts — has been popular for years. Books like Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain and methods like Zettelkasten have inspired millions of people to build knowledge systems. But there's always been a problem:

"The second brain was always dumb. You had to do all the organizing, connecting, and retrieving yourself. Now, with Claude Code living inside your vault, your second brain actually thinks."

What Changes When You Add AI

• Friction disappears. Instead of spending 2 minutes formatting a meeting note, you tell Claude "Had a meeting with Sarah about Q1 roadmap" and it creates the note in your exact format, links the people, tags the project, and adds it to today's daily note. Three seconds.
• Connections emerge. Claude can read your entire vault and spot connections you'd never find manually. "You wrote about this same problem in October — here's what you concluded then."
• Maintenance happens automatically. Batch operations that would take hours — adding tags, filling summaries, organizing orphan notes — Claude handles in seconds.
• Your system gets smarter over time. Every correction you make to Claude becomes a permanent rule in CLAUDE.md. The system learns your preferences and never makes the same mistake twice.

As one user, Dee from Construct by Dee, put it after 14 days of using this setup: "The real gain isn't speed. It's friction removal. When logging takes three seconds instead of two minutes, you actually do it. More notes. More connections. More ideas captured."

How the System Works Together

The architecture is elegantly simple. There are three layers:

Layer 1: Your Obsidian Vault

A folder of plain Markdown files on your computer. Your notes, your structure, your rules. This is the data layer — it contains everything you know.

Layer 2: Claude Code

An AI agent that reads, creates, and manipulates those files. This is the intelligence layer — it understands your content and can act on it.

Layer 3: The CLAUDE.md File

A special Markdown file at the root of your vault that serves as Claude's "instruction manual." This is the memory layer — it tells Claude how you want things done.

# CLAUDE.md - My Vault Instructions

## Folder Structure
- /daily/ — Daily notes (format: YYYY-MM-DD.md)
- /projects/ — Active projects  
- /people/ — Person notes
- /meetings/ — Meeting notes
- /archive/ — Completed projects

## Rules
- Always use [[wiki links]] for people and projects
- Daily notes use template: templates/daily.md
- Tag meetings with #meeting and link attendees
- Never delete notes — move to /archive/ instead

## My Preferences
- I use 24h time format
- Emoji prefix for categories: 📋 tasks, 💡 ideas, 📞 calls
- Summary should be 1-2 sentences max

Every time you start a Claude Code session in your vault, it reads CLAUDE.md first. It knows your folder structure, your templates, your preferences, and your rules. No re-explaining needed.

The Teaching Loop

The real brilliance is how the system improves:

1. You ask Claude to do something: "Log that I had coffee with James to discuss the startup idea"
2. Claude creates the note based on its current understanding
3. You correct anything wrong: "No, social meetings go in /personal/, not /meetings/"
4. The correction becomes a rule in CLAUDE.md
5. The mistake never happens again

One user reported their CLAUDE.md grew from 3 lines to 370+ lines over two weeks — each line representing a preference Claude learned and will never forget.

Setup Guide: From Zero to Running

Setting this up is surprisingly easy. You don't need to be a programmer. Here's the step-by-step:

Step 1: Install Obsidian

1. Go to obsidian.md and download for your OS (Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android)
2. Create a new vault (it's just picking a folder name and location)
3. That's it — you now have an Obsidian vault

Step 2: Install Claude Code

1. You need Node.js installed (download from nodejs.org)
2. Open a terminal and run: npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code
3. You'll need an Anthropic API key or a Claude Max subscription ($100/month for heavy use, or pay per token)

Step 3: Install Obsidian Agent Skills (Optional but Recommended)

The CEO of Obsidian, Steph Ango, created an official set of "Agent Skills" that teach Claude how Obsidian files work — its custom Markdown syntax, JSON Canvas format, and Obsidian Bases.

1. Download the skills from github.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-skills
2. Drop the .claude folder into your Obsidian vault's root directory
3. Claude now understands Obsidian's file formats natively

Step 4: Install the Terminal Plugin

To run Claude Code inside Obsidian (so you can see your notes and talk to Claude side-by-side):

1. Open Obsidian Settings → Community Plugins → Browse
2. Search for "Terminal" and install it
3. Open the terminal panel (it appears in your sidebar)
4. Navigate to your vault: cd /path/to/your/vault
5. Run: claude

Step 5: Create Your CLAUDE.md

You can either write it manually or — the meta move — ask Claude to create it:

claude "Create a CLAUDE.md file for this vault. I want daily notes
in /daily/ with YYYY-MM-DD format, projects in /projects/,
meeting notes in /meetings/, and a /people/ folder for contacts.
I like emoji prefixes and [[wiki links]] between notes."

Claude will generate a comprehensive CLAUDE.md and save it to your vault root. Review it, tweak it, and you're ready to go.

Daily Workflows: What People Actually Do

Here's where theory meets practice. These are real workflows people use every day with Obsidian + Claude Code:

🌅 Morning Routine

> "Start my day"

Claude reads yesterday's daily note, checks open tasks,
scans upcoming meetings, and creates today's daily note with:
- Carried-over tasks from yesterday
- Today's calendar items  
- A "focus for today" section based on project priorities

📋 Quick Logging

> "Had a catch-up with Stefan about the Q1 roadmap"

Claude creates a meeting note at /meetings/2026-02-23-stefan-q1.md,
links [[Stefan]], adds #meeting tag, connects to [[Q1 Roadmap]] project,
and logs the entry in today's daily note.

🔍 Vault Search

> "What did I write about pricing strategies last month?"

Claude searches your vault, finds 3 relevant notes, and
summarizes the key points — pulling from a meeting note,
a book highlight, and a random idea you jotted down at 2am.

🏗️ Batch Maintenance

> "Check all meetings from this week and fill missing summaries and tags"

Claude reads each meeting note, generates 1-2 sentence summaries,
adds appropriate tags, and ensures all attendees are linked.
What would take 30 minutes takes 30 seconds.

📝 Research Integration

> "Find me a simple salmon recipe, create a note using my recipe 
   template, and add a cooking log to today's note"

Claude searches the web, formats the recipe in your template,
saves it to /recipes/, and logs "🍳 Cooking: Salmon" in today's note.

🌙 End-of-Day Review

> "Wrap up my day"

Claude reviews what you logged today, checks which tasks
got completed, moves unfinished ones to tomorrow, and
generates a brief daily summary.

PARA & Zettelkasten: How AI Supercharges Classic Methods

Two note-taking methods dominate the productivity world. Both get dramatically better with AI.

The PARA Method

Tiago Forte's PARA organizes everything into four categories:

• Projects — Active work with deadlines (e.g., "Launch website redesign")
• Areas — Ongoing responsibilities (e.g., "Health," "Finances," "Career")
• Resources — Reference material (e.g., "Cooking recipes," "Python tutorials")
• Archives — Completed or inactive items

How AI supercharges PARA: The hardest part of PARA is deciding where things go and actually moving them when status changes. Claude Code automates this entirely. Tell it "Mark the website project as done" and it moves all related notes to Archive, updates any cross-references, and removes it from your active projects dashboard.

The Zettelkasten Method

Created by German sociologist Niklas Luhmann (who wrote 70+ books using it), Zettelkasten is about writing atomic notes — one idea per note — and linking them extensively. The connections between notes are more important than any organizational hierarchy.

How AI supercharges Zettelkasten:

• Auto-linking: Claude reads a new note and suggests connections to existing notes you'd never have found manually
• Atomic extraction: Paste a long article or book highlight, and Claude breaks it into atomic notes with proper links
• Gap finding: "What topics in my vault have few connections?" reveals areas where your knowledge is thin
• Synthesis: "Write a summary combining everything I know about X" pulls from dozens of atomic notes

The AI Advantage: Remove the Cognitive Load

The dirty secret of both PARA and Zettelkasten is that maintaining the system is work. Deciding where a note goes, creating the links, keeping things current — it's cognitive overhead that causes most people to abandon their systems within weeks.

Claude Code removes that overhead. As Oliver Eichler wrote in his follow-up to building a second brain: "The automation is a skill that encodes all of this once. Then every future collaboration starts with that knowledge already in place. More time thinking, less time explaining."

Real-World Use Cases

📊 Project Tracking

Sonny Huynh built a full project management system inside Obsidian with Claude Code. Each project gets a note with status, tasks, links to related meetings and people, and auto-generated progress summaries. Claude updates project status by scanning related daily notes — if you logged work on a project today, it automatically appears in the project's activity feed.

📓 Journaling

One of the most popular use cases. Tell Claude what happened today in natural language, and it formats your journal entry with your preferred structure — mood, highlights, gratitude, goals. As Dee noted: "When logging takes three seconds instead of two minutes, you actually do it."

🔬 Research

Joe Rice-Jones at XDA Developers uses Claude Code inside Obsidian as what he calls "a local NotebookLM." He has Claude research topics, create summaries, and automatically connect new research to existing notes. Combined with the Obsidian Web Clipper browser extension, anything he saves from the web gets automatically categorized and linked to relevant vault content.

💻 Code + Writing Integration

For developers, this is a natural fit. Keep code documentation, API notes, debugging logs, and project specs in Obsidian. Claude Code can read these notes for context when you switch to coding tasks — your knowledge base becomes your AI's context window.

🏋️ Habit Tracking

Tell Claude "Went to the gym — did 30 min cardio and upper body" and it logs the workout in your template, updates your weekly exercise tracker, and adds a streak counter. No apps needed — just plain text that you own forever.

👥 People CRM

Maintain notes on everyone you interact with. Each person gets a note with context: where you met, what you discussed, follow-up items. Claude automatically links people to meetings and projects. Ask "When did I last talk to Sarah?" and get an instant answer pulled from your vault.

Privacy Considerations: The Honest Truth

This is important, and we need to be honest about it.

The promise of Obsidian is local-first. Your notes stay on your machine as plain files. No cloud, no corporate servers, no company reading your thoughts. That's a big reason people choose Obsidian over Notion or Google Docs.

The reality of Claude Code partially breaks that promise. When you ask Claude to process a note, that note's content is sent to Anthropic's servers for processing. Your data leaves your machine.

How to Mitigate

• Use .claudeignore — Like .gitignore, this file tells Claude which folders/files to never read. Put sensitive content here.
• Keep secrets out of your vault — Passwords, API keys, and truly confidential info should live elsewhere
• Review before confirming — Claude Code shows you what it wants to do before executing. Read the diffs.
• Regular backups — Your vault is just a folder. Back it up like any other important data.
• Anthropic's policy — Anthropic states they don't train on API data. But data still transits their servers.

The Honest Trade-Off

As Dee from Construct by Dee put it: "The worst that could happen is Anthropic gifting me a few free therapy sessions after reading my journal." Joking aside, this is a real trade-off. The privacy benefits of Obsidian are partially negated by sending content to an AI API. You need to decide if the productivity gains are worth it for your situation.

Promising developments: the community is actively exploring offline/local LLM options that would keep everything truly on-device. When models like Llama run reliably on consumer hardware, the setup becomes 100% private.

Alternatives: How Does This Compare?

Why Obsidian + Claude Code Wins

The key differentiator is flexibility and ownership. With Notion AI, you're locked into Notion's format and Notion's AI. If they raise prices, change features, or shut down, you're stuck. With Obsidian + Claude Code:

• Your notes are portable Markdown files forever
• You can swap Claude Code for any other AI agent (Gemini CLI, OpenAI Codex, local LLMs)
• Your CLAUDE.md skills transfer to any AI that reads markdown
• The plugin ecosystem is unmatched in breadth

The trade-off: it requires more setup than Notion AI (which works out of the box). But once configured, it's more powerful and more future-proof.

Getting Started Today: Your First 30 Minutes

Here's a practical plan to go from zero to a working system in 30 minutes:

1. Minutes 1-5: Download and install Obsidian. Create a new vault called "Life."
2. Minutes 5-10: Install Claude Code (npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code). Set up your API key.
3. Minutes 10-15: Open terminal in your vault folder. Run claude. Ask it: "Create a minimal folder structure for personal knowledge management with daily notes, projects, people, and meetings."
4. Minutes 15-20: Download Obsidian Agent Skills and drop the .claude folder into your vault.
5. Minutes 20-25: Ask Claude: "Create a CLAUDE.md file with my vault conventions. I want daily notes in YYYY-MM-DD format, wiki links between notes, and emoji prefixes."
6. Minutes 25-30: Create your first daily note: "Start my day. I have a meeting with [someone] about [something] at 2pm."

The Claude "To-Do" Trick

Here's a clever workflow from the Reddit community: Create a special file in your vault called claude-todo.md. Whenever you think of something for Claude to do, add it to this file. Then your only Claude Code command ever is:

> "Check your to-do"

Claude reads the to-do file, executes each task, marks them complete, and adds a summary to a changelog file. You get a running history of everything Claude has done in your vault. Minimal input, maximum output.

References

1. Artem Zhutov — "Claude Code Runs My Life In Obsidian" (YouTube, December 2025)
2. Bradley Bonanno — "This Claude Code Second Brain Manages My ENTIRE Life in Obsidian (100% Private)" (YouTube, January 2026)
3. Joe Rice-Jones — "I put Claude Code inside Obsidian, and it was awesome" (XDA Developers, February 2026)
4. Dee — "My First 14 Days of Claude Code + Obsidian" (Construct by Dee, January 2026)
5. Sonny Huynh — "I Built an AI-Powered Second Brain with Obsidian + Claude Code" (Medium, January 2026)
6. Yu Lu — "Obsidian X Claude Code — A Seamless Vibe Writing Experience" (Medium, January 2026)
7. Huy Tieu — COG Second Brain (Claude-Obsidian-GitHub) (GitHub)
8. Oliver Eichler — "Teaching AI to Plan Better — A Second Brain Follow-up" (AI in Plain English, February 2026)
9. Obsidian — Official Website
10. Obsidian Agent Skills — Official GitHub Repository
11. Reddit r/ClaudeAI — "Claude Code + Obsidian: How I Use It & Short Guide"
12. Reddit r/ObsidianMD — "Obsidian + Claude Code / Gemini"
13. "I Built My Second Brain with Claude Code + Obsidian + Skills" (YouTube, January 2026)
14. "How I Supercharged My Second Brain with Claude Code" (YouTube, October 2025)
15. Tiago Forte — "The PARA Method" (Forte Labs)