Over the past year or so it has become incredibly common for people to post about their organizational improvements to their vault using Claude, integrating Claude code with obsidian or just generally give their AIs access to their personal vault for some kind of summarization or bookkeeping task.

I feel like while my vault is a bit under organized, I cannot bear the idea of giving an AI company access to my personal notes just for the minimal organizational improvement.

Are there any meaningful use cases where this is not necessarily valid? Have you guys tried using AI with your vault?

First of all, I'd like to start off with this: I do not care what your views of generative AI are. While I personally dislike generative AI for a slew of reasons, that is not the point of this post.

FROM THE MODS OF r/ObsidianMD
Please do not post content that was primarily generated by AI. See rules below.

I'm not gonna go on a big tangent about y'all's doubts; y'all are grown enough to know how to identify the use of generative AI.

Maybe it's that the AI flair is mutually exclusive with everything else, but even when the use of generative AI is blatantly obvious it's not accompanied with the AI flair. Like, your plugin dashboard that looks like the website of a 2012 startup learning that Electron exists is not fooling anyone, and just because you use -- instead of — does not make people go "oop, this can't be AI!!!"

I personally dislike how AI has co-opted the use of so many really effective rhetorical devices (e.g. litotes, rule of threes, not X but Y) to the point that I make an effort to sprinkle them into the texts I write from time to time, but people do not write reddit posts showcasing their plugin like they're writing an essay, it's just not how people engage with the medium (that was one AI-like sentence, was it not? See what I mean?)

It doesn't help that this AI is so commonly accompanied by the most productivity-theater-ass plugins

Some of y'all need to chill a bit with the influencing.

TL;DR: Start rambling all your thoughts into obsidian, best way to increase productivity. Better than time tracking.

I'm all for time tracking / time blocking, I've tried several of those tools, measured every hour of my day, down to how much time I spent on the toilet LOL.
It's rewarding to track my time but it's SO draining. Every other minute I have to trigger a shortcut to track what i'm doing.

Instead, I've starting to just whip out my phone and open my daily note, turn on dictation, and just spew out my thoughts with no filter. Absolutely no filter, whatever I was doing / thinking / ideas. At the end of each day I get opencode to go through my daily note directly ifrom my Obsidian vault. Immediately it may not be very impactful, maybe it can do basic stuff like help you extract tasks, summarize your thoughts cleanly, help you set goals for tmr. Nothing crazy.

BUT when you do it over weeks, months, this journal gradually becomes your second brain. LLM can use that to build a Personal Charter for you, help you off load some (not all) decision making and bring clarity to your thoughts when you need it. If you're fancy with your prompts it can even use tags to built a heatmap of how you've spent your time with hour/day granularity. (queries in Obsidian are so powerful✨)

You should honestly try this if you haven't. I've never been a "keep a journal" guy but now that LLM is so affordable and powerful, and the friction of "writing things down" is gone, I find it very useful.

I've gained so much clarity on my life and worked so much more productively just because of this habit.
I hope this helps you!

If you've ever tried journaling in Obsidian and thought "why does this look so bad", "why is it so painful to browse old entries", or "I really wish I could see what I wrote on this day last year" — this is for you.

What it does:

• Calendar & list views — browse entries by month or timeline, with photo thumbnails in each card
• On This Day — shows what you wrote on this date in past years, which turns out to be genuinely nice to have
• Journal-style image layout — 1–5+ photos auto-arrange into grids, same look in both the home panel and Live Preview

Still v0.1, but it's been part of my daily workflow for a while now.

Install via BRAT:

1. Install the BRAT plugin from community plugins
2. Add this repo: https://github.com/Lam-L/ObJournal

Happy to take feedback here!

Update:
 I spent about two weeks building this — you can see the history in the old repo Objournal-Old . I switched to a new repo to clean up the commits and keep them more consistent.

I just pushed an update, so pull the latest and give it a try. If it still feels jerky with ~60 notes or you run into anything weird, let me know. Thanks for the feedback.

Hi r/ObsidianMD,

I've been a heavy Obsidian + Zotero user for years doing research notes. Every single time I tried to copy math equations, tables or double-column sections from academic PDFs, it was a nightmare — formulas broke, tables turned into garbage, footnotes vanished.

I finally got so fed up that I spent a few weeks building my own parser. It first detects layout, then uses targeted vision processing for math and tables, and outputs clean Markdown with perfect LaTeX that renders beautifully with MathJax in Obsidian (footnotes also work the way we like).

It's still early beta. If you have any "nightmare PDFs" (dense math, weird tables, scanned stuff, Zotero exports, etc.), I'd love you to throw them at the playground and tell me where it breaks. No login, no email, just drag & drop.

Super grateful for any feedback — this tool literally only exists because I was tired of the exact same pain we all deal with every day.

Thanks!

To preface, I just began using Obsidian "properly," that is, linking, creating properties, bases, etc, and I'm getting more into detailing my notes. Now I see how people are linking AI with their notes. As someone who is against AI for many reasons, I don't really want to do this, but for those who have, do you feel like you are benefiting from using hermes or claude?

EDIT: I use obsidian for my personal writing, journaling, and academic work

I've been using Karpathy's LLM Wiki setup (Obsidian + Claude Code) for about two weeks, and I'm pretty impressed so far.

It feels like a different approach to knowledge management. Instead of spending time organizing notes, I'm focusing more on collecting information and letting the AI handle much of the structure and linking.

For those who've been using it for a few months or longer, has it meaningfully improved your work or thinking? What do you use it for, and what benefits or drawbacks have you discovered over time?

Curious to hear some long-term experiences.

Hey r/ObsidianMD,

Quick update. You might know this project as MCP-Obsidian. Obsidian asked me to change the name for trademark reasons, so it’s now MCPVault. New repo, new domain, same project. If you already have it configured, nothing breaks. The old npm package has a deprecation notice pointing to the new one, and I’ll keep maintaining it so existing setups stay stable.

New repo: https://github.com/bitbonsai/mcpvault New docs: https://mcpvault.org

Now, the actual news

Thank you, contributors

v0.9.0 exists because of you. Community PRs fixed trailing-slash search bugs, dotted folder edge cases, multi-word BM25 relevance, .base and .canvas support, safer frontmatter handling, binary-safe file moves, and more. To everyone who filed an issue, opened a PR, or reviewed code: thank you. This project is genuinely better because of your time.

What’s new: the Skill

The biggest addition since launch. MCPVault now ships with a Skill that teaches your AI assistant how to route vault operations automatically:

• MCP server for reads, writes, search, patching, frontmatter, tags
• Obsidian CLI for opening notes in the app, triggering plugins, exporting PDF
• Git CLI for vault sync across devices (free alternative to Obsidian Sync)

You say “sync my vault” and it runs preflight checks, asks one question if needed, then handles the git sequence. You say “search my notes for X” and it routes to MCP. You say “open this note” and it opens the app.

Install with one command:

npx skills add bitbonsai/mcpvault

Numbers

700+ GitHub stars. 30,000+ npm downloads. 14 MCP tools. Works with Claude Desktop, Claude Code, ChatGPT+, Gemini CLI, Codex, Cursor, Windsurf, IntelliJ, OpenCode. Still one line:

``` npx @bitbonsai/mcpvault@latest /path/to/vault

Or

npx @bitbonsai/mcpvault@latest # if you’re in the vault’s folder

```

Same principles

Simple, stable, fast. Filesystem-first. Your notes stay local. If something feels off, tell me.

GitHub: https://github.com/bitbonsai/mcpvault Docs: https://mcpvault.org

It just seems like an AI generated zettelkasten. Raw, Source and Wiki folders are just another terms for Fleeting, Literature and Permanent notes.

The idea itself is not bad. I have a lot of sources from my field that I reference from time to time but I'm too lazy to atomize them myself. But why is everybody acting like it's some sort of lifechanging thing?

Also I have a quite small vault. Some +2000 atomic notes. Just yesterday I've asked Opus 4.7 to read and categorize all of them. I've used all my usage on that. How the hell do expect it to work when you have +10K notes full of AI generated summarizes? Not talking about hallucination and the need to evaluate every single note anyways. Maintaining AI curated vault is just not sustainable.

I'm glad that thanks to the AI bros Obsidian is finally receiving the attention it deserves. On the other hand, it feels like these people are rediscovering wheel.

I see a lot of people advertising, promoting and showing off one of the use "wonderful" cases for LLMs - automatic note taking.

As I saw note taking is a process of analyzing, learning and storing your data. The process in itself is the goal. People use different frameworks for note taking, depending on their needs and preferences, as it makes the process more interesting and focused

In other words, the process is the goal of note taking. Maybe not the only goal, but one of the few goals of note taking.

LLMs seem to take away the whole purpose of note taking, the more you use LLMs for note taking, the less useful note taking becomes. After a certain point, it becomes just data hoarding?

i made a plugin that connects Obsidian to Claude Code. Claude Code now knows what you have open or selected in Obsidian.

no embedded terminal. no Python. no Agent SDK. no chat sidebar.

install via BRAT: petersolopov/obsidian-claude-ide then type /ide in Claude Code and select "Obsidian".

feedback welcome: GitHub

The article is here and is about Google's new proposed open knowledge format. While I recommend reading it, here is the quote for those who want the TL;DR version:

Similar knowledge-as-Wiki pattern keeps reappearing under different names: Obsidian vaults wired to coding agents, the AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md family of convention files, repos full of index.md and log.md artifacts that agents consult before doing real work, and "metadata as code" repositories inside data teams. 

Hey everyone,

It's been a while since my last post. I've been heads down working on the two most requested features since day one, and I'm happy to finally share them.

Mobile - True Recall now works on your phone. It took way longer than I expected (integrating with Obsidian mobile is tricky, as some of you know from my earlier comments), but reviewing your flashcards on the go is finally possible.

Sync between devices - your cards, schedules and review history now stay in sync across desktop and mobile. Start a review session on your laptop, finish it on your phone.

For newcomers: True Recall is a fully native spaced repetition system for Obsidian, like Anki but living alongside your notes. Cards are scheduled by FSRS, and there's AI flashcard generation, image occlusion, note review, knowledge base chat and more. You can install it directly from Community Plugins.

A quick note: I'm building this solo, in my free time. The mobile version is a beta, so bugs will happen. If you catch anything weird on any device, please report it. Every bug report genuinely helps me ship fixes faster. Since 2.0 I've been pushing updates constantly, squashing everything I find and everything you send me.

Website / docs: https://community.obsidian.md/account/plugins/true-recall

Let me know how it works for you!

I see so many of these "use AI to do X with your vault" tools here and it makes me wonder - how are people actually using these, and do you actually find them helpful? And in what ways?

The reason I'm asking is because it seems you gain the most benefit from using Obsidian when you do your thinking yourself. Using AI to query the vault in this fashion feels like it takes that away. When I create notes I want to use my own thinking, find my own connections, etc.

Just curious to understand other people's approaches, not criticizing how anyone else uses Obsidian :)

(I'm not making a tool like this, and I have no intention of making one, just so it's clear I'm not doing market research because this type of question could probably be seen like that)

https://x.com/karpathy/status/2039805659525644595?s=46

Andrej Karpathy (former OpenAI and Tesla) just posted his workflow for crunching knowledge, makes heavy use of Obsidian.

If you're a fan of the PARA method to keep track of your projects' progress, daily tasks, habits, etc. but you find that you usually start it and then eventually just drop it because it gets tedious, try leveraging opencode or claude skills to automate the tedious parts and help you keep it running smoothly.

Everyone has their own way of doing things but if you're looking for a place to start, I made a repo to help get you started: https://github.com/pricklywiggles/niamos

The theme is a modified version of typewriter.

I wake up pretty early and go for a walk.
Somewhere along the way, that became part of how i use Obsidian.

I've mapped my iPhone's action button to a series of shortcuts that opens Obsidian and starts Willow Voice dictation. Then I just walk and talk. My ideas, my plans, something I'm working on. Sometimes I'm talking through a particular project. I don't have to sit down and decide how to write it all out first.

One morning I ended up with something like 15 paragraphs. I hadn't edited anything, I'd just spoken naturally while walking, and there it was.

I call my Obsidian setup my "Knowledge OS." It holds my thoughts, ideas and project context, and the AI tools I use can draw on it. I use Grok more generally and OpenAI and Claude for development work. When I'm working on a project, I'll ask the AI to look through that context and pull out what's relevant.

So those morning conversations become material I can use later. I might talk through a plan on a walk, then come back to the project and have that thinking available. Obsidian gives it somewhere to live.

The small bits of friction matter a lot to me. If I correct myself halfway through a sentence: “tomorrow we’re going to… no, the day after”, I want the correction captured without having to go back and delete the first attempt. That’s one of the things I like about the dictation I'm using.

It's still not completely seamless on the phone. Sometimes I have to switch keyboards or reactivate the app, and after a timeout I can end up pasting the text manually. One extra tap sounds trivial until you’re doing it repeatedly. It takes you out of what you were thinking about.

I've also been experimenting with AssistiveTouch for other parts of my phone workflow. I'm always looking for the smallest number of steps between having a thought and getting it somewhere useful.

Anyone else using Obsidian this way? I'd be interested in what happens to your dictated notes afterward - whether you keep the whole conversation together or break it into smaller notes and link them up.

i mostly use obsidian to keep track of sources, take notes, and hopefully maybe write my own article / book / video.

at no point in this process do i want someone elses work to enter my flow. i want to utilize my research skills, hone my note-taking skills, and develop my analytical products. i find the process to be fun, i think the process is useful. i have time to do these things. why would i want to add ai to the mix?

i view ai as outsourcing your analytical skills, which reflects into every output / action / thing you do. im genuinely curious, i dont see the benefits, could you share some of your stories? how do you use obsidian, how does ai filter into your process, is it better than manual?

Ive been using Obsidian in combination with Claude, and have a pretty big Vault with different Sub-Vaults, one for Uni, Job & Applications, Projects, etc.. Was wondering if it made sense to keep on going with this structure or to restructure into entirely new, specialized Vaults

My wife is an academic and writes all her notes for papers in Obsidian. I kept watching her jump between the editor, terminal, browser, and academic databases over and over while working on a single paper, so I built this for her.

It’s called KatmerCode: Claude Code inside Obsidian as a sidebar chat.

It uses the Agent SDK, so you get the same core workflow as the terminal version, but next to your manuscript: tools, MCP servers, subagents, /compact, streaming, session resume, all of it.

The part I’m happiest with is the academic workflow. It ships with slash-command skills like:

• /peer-review — evaluates a manuscript across 8 criteria and generates an HTML review report
• /cite-verify — checks references against CrossRef, Semantic Scholar, and OpenAlex
• /research-gap — searches the literature and identifies promising gaps
• /journal-match — suggests target journals based on your manuscript and references
• /lit-search, /citation-network, /abstract too

It also does inline diff editing inside Obsidian, so when Claude changes a file you see word-level track changes with accept/undo controls instead of blind overwrites.

The reports are one of my favorite parts: they open inside Obsidian or in the browser, with charts, tables, badges, and a consistent academic-style design.

Honest caveat: these are research aids, not oracles. Database coverage is imperfect, and a skill like /peer-review is not a substitute for a real reviewer. The value is in catching issues early and surfacing things you might otherwise miss.

This is still early (v0.1.0) and definitely has rough edges, but it’s already useful in a real workflow here.

Open source (MIT): https://github.com/hkcanan/katmer-code

If you write in Obsidian, especially for academic work, I’d genuinely love feedback on what would make something like this actually useful.

Hey everyone,

I got tired of manually linking notes that were clearly related but had no explicit connection, so I built rhizome: a CLI tool that reads your vault, embeds every note using a local sentence transformer, and writes a ## Related Notes section at the bottom of each file with [[wikilinks]].

The core idea: instead of keyword matching, it uses cosine similarity over dense embeddings — so it catches semantic relationships even when notes don't share a single word.

What makes it different:

- 100% local — ONNX Runtime on CPU, no GPU needed, zero network calls after the first model download (~250 MB, once)

- Multilingual out of the box (paraphrase-multilingual-MiniLM-L12-v2)

- Scales automatically — exact numpy search for small vaults, approximate HNSW for large ones

- Idempotent — re-running replaces the section, never duplicates it

- Dry-run mode so you can preview every proposed link before touching anything

- Timestamped backups before any write

The default model handles mixed-language vaults out of the box, but you can swap it for a leaner English-only model (~90 MB) or a higher-quality one if precision matters more than speed — just set MODEL_NAME in your .env.

Works with Obsidian and Logseq.

It's early but stable. I'd love feedback — especially from people with large vaults or non-English notes, since that's where the interesting edge cases live.

You can check the repo: https://github.com/matzalazar/rhizome

Happy to answer questions about how the embedding pipeline works or why I went with ONNX over the standard HuggingFace stack.

---

**UPDATE:** `INCLUDE_DIRS` is now available! You can now allowlist specific folders instead of having to exclude everything else. Thanks to the feedback from

u/rocsci, u/Loud_Respond9364, u/unfuckthepine, u/RundleSG and u/torwinMarkov.

Check https://github.com/matzalazar/rhizome/issues/1

**UPDATE 2:** Long note support is now available!

The embedding pipeline now uses chunking + mean pooling instead of hard truncation. Notes of any length get fully embedded — no more losing content beyond the first paragraph.

Thanks to u/ProfitAppropriate134 and u/jasonmehmel for surfacing this as a real edge case.

Check https://github.com/matzalazar/rhizome/issues/2

For several months now I have had a second brain setup, documenting my life. It’s been revolutionary for my mental health. I have a a very noisy life. The volume of communication I have to keep up with is mind blowing. Between work and life, I have a lot of relationships that need maintenance.

The setup:

I have a Mac mini dedicated to the second brain, headless’ish. I gave Claude access to my iMessages, email, calendars, reminders, etc. Twice a day a script runs that scans for new inputs, and uses Claude to help reason/summaries the interactions. It puts them in Obsidian and neatly files things away. Weekly another script runs to apply tags/links and flags things it’s not certain about for review. Obsidian syncs it to all my devices seamlessly. I leave notes for Claude to fix stuff and it picks it up on the next daily run.

Here are a couple of examples how this has helped me:

I was reviewing the week (in Obsidian) and noticed that my wife was carrying a lot of the burden of daycare pickup among other small stressors. Seeing the week’s communication summarized neatly at a glance, helped me see I needed to step up. I cleared my schedule for a few days and gave her a break.

The second brain captured details from a conversation I had a month ago. I needed that info asap for a meeting and was flustered, I couldn’t remember where/who the conversation happened. There was some medical urgency so to say I was stressed is an understatement. Searched obsidian using semantic linkage (smart connections plug in) and it had exactly the information I needed.

I am not sure of “second brain” quite captures the nature of this system.

Sometimes you just need to make something stand out in your notes. So you don't forget. So your eye catches it right away.

For that, Obsidian has callouts. They look like this:

```

[!info] Important Thought This is something I can't miss ```

You can use other keywords like warning, tip, danger, or example — different themes give each one a unique icon and color.

That's already better than plain text. But still — it feels too official. Too stiff. Like a user manual for a printer.

I wanted something warmer. I wanted my notes to feel like a paper journal. I wanted an important reminder to look like a sticky note on a fridge — bright, compact, and human.

Good news: Obsidian supports custom CSS out of the box. So I made my own callouts. And so can you.

What I Ended Up With

I made a yellow sticky note. Here's how it looks in code:

```

[!sticker] Don't Forget Buy bread, milk, and smile at strangers ```

The result is compact (doesn't stretch full width), yellow (like a real sticky note), with a soft shadow for that "actually stuck to the page" feel.

And yes — you can collapse these too. Just add + or -:

```

[!sticker]+ Click to Expand The text is hidden until you need it. Neat, right? ```

What If I Want It to Look Handwritten?

Want the text on your sticker to look like you actually wrote it with a pen? Easy.

Just add -hand to the callout. It changes the font inside to a cursive script.

```

[!sticker-hand] Reminder This looks like I wrote it by hand. Warm and human. ```

There's also a second option: -hand2. A slightly different "handwriting" style for variety.

How to Get This on Your System in One Minute

All you need is a single CSS file.

1. Download the file using the link below
2. Place it in your vault's snippets folder: .obsidian/snippets/
3. In Obsidian, go to Settings → Appearance → CSS snippets (all the way at the bottom)
4. Click "Reload" — the file will appear in the list
5. Turn it on with the toggle switch

That's it. No plugins. No magic. Just sticky notes.

Link to the file sourse: [ https://izumrud.data.blog/sticker/ ]

Now your notes can be not just useful, but also warm. Like a good old paper journal. Sticky notes, margin scribbles, handwritten reminders — all inside Obsidian.

Have a great weekend, everyone! 😉

If you try it out, show me what you made. I'm curious which color everyone ends up using most.

https://izumrud.data.blog/sticker/

Подроднее тут​ *****

For those that are using obsidian program:

I made DnD Character sheet in Obsidian with 2024 rules. Its completely done by Claude AI, i can't code but i understand some basics. Its has many features like:

- showing death saves when character is at 0 Hp, hiding when character is healed at least 1 Hp or done all death saves succesfully

- conditions changes character sheet data depending on condition, example when you reach exhaustion level 6, its drop you dead and changes speed to 0. (Updated, in video is showing bug that on exhaustion lvl 6, character is dead but has 5 ft. speed still)

- you can update the whole character sheet with **update character sheet** button, you can also copy blank template if you want fresh new character

- it calculates ability score bonuses and skills based with **recalculate from ability scores** button inside update character sheet box

- you can setup multiclasses (video has older version where it wasnt done properly), setup which class is which level and if one of those classes is spellcaster (even subclasses with spells like Eldritch knigh) than the character sheet updates the spell slots based on the classes you are using

- spells could be inserter if you have setup spell notes with #Spell tag, there are examples in my github how so it knows which spells have **Using higher level spell slot** option and update the spell tab based on that, like in DnDBeyond where you have for example Fireball in each level from level 3 but with different damage amout, this character sheet does this also

- there is also template and modal form data that could made a character creation using button that opens a templater and made a new character this way

https://github.com/Majsnic/Obsidian-DnD-Character-sheet-