How I Use Obsidian + Claude Code to Run My Life

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 Cloud 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 Cloud Code, how to set up these commands that really drive the most out of Cloud 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 Cloud 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've got my dear friend Vin, also known as Internet Vin, on the podcast.
I literally begged him to come on.
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?
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 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.
All right.
From your lips to God's ears.
Let's get into it.
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 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.
Right.
Right.
And it's going to go and do this.
That's really cool.
That's something 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 we go.
Hello, Greg.
That's crazy.
Right.
Now, 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 with an agent, 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.
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.
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, the faster you can delegate to it.
OK, 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 to do list app that.
Is very minimally designed and reads from all of my calendar and my messages and 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.
And why that's important is because.
It's the context, right?
Yes.
The whole game is feeding the beast good context.
Yes, exactly.
And I don't want to have to do this over and over again.
And when I work on this over days, I'm not going to remember like what we talked about.
Right.
So I want some kind of file that I can like pass in.
Oh, sorry, Greg.
One sec.
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 OK.
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.
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 can make these like very complex.
You can build them into like robust files right over time.
So we know that cloud code can create files and it can repeat and it can 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 going to be to do dash app.
Here it is.
Boom.
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 going to read this file and it's going to 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 a collection of Markdown files.
Right.
So here like this is reading a Markdown file, how I use Obsidian story development.
Right.
I have daily notes.
This is my daily notes.
This is a this is also a Markdown file.
I should do my own fundamental analysis into think into how things stay pure when they grow and become more mainstream.
Right.
This is just a file that I have.
I have, you know, like a file on Greg Eisenberg that I haven't put.
That's weird.
Yeah.
That's pretty weird.
And so I make files like notes of things that I'm learning from people and stuff like that, too.
So I have different 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.
But what it does is it also allows you to connect relationships between files.
So I can say today I am on 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 people, 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 keep making these like interrelationships over time.
Right.
And so what happens here's a little visualization.
And so in here, these are each one of these circles is a file.
And 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 is like so much personal information in here because this is like my personal thing.
So I don't even know like what's going to show up on the screen here.
Right.
But that's part of doing demos like this, which is which are kind of weird and interesting.
But you can see personal agent infrastructure links to like a Gentic AI.
There's like a link here to Telegram.
There's a link here to like Toby, the founder of Shopify.
There's a link to like presence log, Claude bot, you know, and then here's like I have a podcast to call 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.
So if I'm listening.
I love you too, Vin.
I love you too.
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 it.
It works more like the way your brain works.
Your brain connects these patterns all the time.
Question.
Yeah, yeah.
So I see why it's interesting.
But how does this get me better output?
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 Cloud 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 Cloud Code not only those files that it can read and access, but it can also give Cloud 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 understand about 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?
And every single note you're making across these different domains 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.
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 Cloud 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 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 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 Cloud, 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 going to 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 going to 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 wanted to know.
I just did that one command and now it's going to 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 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 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, it can more effectively give you information about what you should do or not do.
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, needs 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 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.
That's my favorite way of using LLMs.
I know people like to use 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.
So ghost, here's a command I have.
It answers a question the way I would.
It builds a 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 going to 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 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 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.
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 ideas across all domains.
This gives me 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 things I'm writing about in my vault.
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 commands because of how much personal information is in my vault.
But still, I don't even know, like I can't even control what is going to show up on the screen.
And 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?
Those are commands that I created.
And you can create them very easily by just asking Claude Code to create a specific command.
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 skills.
If that's, if that's.
Yeah, for sure.
Totally.
Yeah.
So you could see here, what I did was I just typed slash trace demo.
Demo is just because I'm showing this publicly, how I use Obsidian.
And so what this does is it tracks my, the way I've developed and 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 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 it.
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 dialogue loops, Canopio 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 backlinked.
It says 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 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 me to actively prompt and manage each session.
The next unlocked is figuring out how to get agents tasked 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 very useful thing for me to understand how my use of this tool is evolving.
And 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 can reflect on the different things I'm learning.
I just think this is insane that 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 I can just like now write in here and, you know, as I'm thinking about things and it gives me ideas, right?
About 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 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 note, right?
It's an idea.
So that's an example of something.
So I think a part of getting good at Obsidian sounds like, 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.
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.
Yes.
You know, how do you, how have you been able to insert reflection into your life?
Yeah, I think for me, it's really about, there's two reasons that I think reflection is interesting and making notes a lot is interesting.
One is that it's great to be able to look back on them.
Like for me now, obviously I can use an agent, but for me to go back and see these notes and realizing that, oh, like I'm a person that's continually changing.
My skill is continually changing.
Projects are continually evolving.
It's, it's just amazing.
It's an amazing part of life to be able to reflect on how things are changing over time and how you are changing over time and how the world is changing over time.
But the other thing is that there's like a functional reason to a reason I like to make notes a lot is because that's how I generate ideas.
When I like get, when I sit down on my computer and I write things down, that's where ideas come.
For example, this thing I just wrote here, it's just a quick note.
I'm just doing it in real time.
I'm just making it up right now.
But by writing it out, I feel like I internalize it more and I like having good ideas.
I like progressing.
So because I like having good ideas and I like progressing, writing is how I do that.
And so I think to, you know, if you want to cultivate like a writing as a habit, I think first you have to connect it with the idea that this is how you progress and this is how you generate ideas.
And this is how you have form original ways of thinking.
The other thing I'll say is that writing right now is a big way of how you delegate things to agents.
That's like a whole new, that's a whole new aspect of it.
So if you can develop a writing habit, you have a lot more context that you can pass over to an agent, which then dramatically, I think, increases the amount of like things you can delegate and the amount of things you can build.
I hope that was a good answer.
How does this relate to OpenClaw?
Because if you think of OpenClaw, it's essentially, you know, at the best case, an extension of you.
Yeah.
That could go and do things, you know, independently slash based on your guidance.
So how can you use commands, Obsidian and OpenClaw and reflection harmoniously?
Yeah.
So I think if you look at like, here's an example of one command that I do, it's just like a schedule command.
And so what I asked this thing to do is I said, schedule, I said, can I take a meeting with Greg Eisenberg today at Feb 20 at 2 p.m.?
Right.
And what this does is, of course, it can look at my calendar and stuff like that, but it's also going to look through my daily notes.
It's going to look through what I care about and then it's going to give me some perspective.
So it says, your day is stacked.
You're already recording on Greg's podcast this morning, followed by a team lunch outing and meeting with Peter and Vince.
Your Feb 17 notes show the Greg episode has been top of mind.
The bulk has a dedicated Greg Eisenberg note.
No, not a 2.
So the recommendation is no, not a 2 p.m., but you might not need a separate meeting at all.
Yeah, that's that's actually the correct answer.
How does that relate to OpenClaw?
Well, OpenClaw is this like autonomous agent that can go and do things if you set it up to do that.
Like it can do things without you having to prompt it all the time.
It can just go and make decisions and build things for you on your own.
So now what OpenClaw can do is in the same way I just did this command, OpenClaw can do this on its own as well.
And it can go and read my vault, find connections and then make decisions on behalf of me with like a deeper understanding of me.
And now instead of like managing an agent or talking to another human about working on something, I just focus on managing this vault.
This is like the new source.
I just continually try and make it so that this vault has all of the information needed so that I can delegate to an agent.
And the agent can just pull from this vault source and make decisions.
And if it's not making the right decisions, I'm changing something on the vault.
I'm not necessarily working with the agent specifically.
Kind of kind of that's my speculation on that subject.
I think it's very interesting.
Yeah, I think one thing that worries me a little bit about it is if Obsidian is really your second brain,
giving OpenClaw access to your second brain is scary.
Yeah, scary.
And I would say that is the fundamental, the weird element of this technology, I would say.
And I have purposely given Obsidian, I mean, sorry, Claude Code or any agent access to a lot of information.
I've purposely done that because my relationship with this is I want to understand what these things are.
And I want to understand what they're revealing about, you know, how our relationship with computers is changing.
But it's weird.
It's like you have to really think about how much information you're sharing with these agents
and whether that's the right decision or not the right decision.
And I think it's going to be very interesting to see how privacy as a concept evolves and changes
and what we fight for or don't fight for in the future of our society and our world.
Even with every one of these commands, I had to create a new version of them, a demo version,
so that it wouldn't reveal too much personal information while I'm on screen on this podcast.
And even then, it's like a toss-up.
You know, I could type the demo version, but who knows what's going to be shown on screen, you know?
What other commands do you want to show?
So there's connect, which allows me to take two domains and connect them using the vault's link graph.
So I can just say I did one here.
And I just asked it to connect filmmaking and world building.
And so it goes through and it reads all these different files.
And then it can start to say, okay, let's connect these two concepts.
So notes and filmmaking's neighborhood.
So I was like 35 film watch lists, my first meeting with Toby, notes in the world building neighborhood,
the world building essay, new as a media company.
So these are different things I'm thinking about.
So bridge one, the interview portal and the constructed world in filmmaking.
If I notice something specific and ask the question about it,
it would open a portal into a person's internal world,
which is often a vast universe of concepts and beliefs and visions.
So world building essay.
I want my blog to show you what I value, what I believe, what I worry about.
Like a tomb from ancient Egypt.
I want my blog to be a place that you dig up and examine long after I'm gone.
These are things that I've written and I can start to see how these ideas connect together.
Bridge to always on documentary equals continuous world building.
Always on documentary is a creative strategy where companies continuously narrativize their characters,
pursuits, conflicts, and visions through documentary.
So these are like things that I'm writing about and it's showing me the ways in which these are connected.
I think this can get very interesting depending on the kinds of things that you're willing to connect together.
You could get probably pretty crazy with it as well, depending on what you're writing about in your vault.
I could connect like shawarma and startups if I wanted to, for example, and see the kind of connections that are coming between these things.
Again, really interesting because all of this is happening super quickly and I don't need to explain any of this to an LLM.
I can just type something like slash connect filmmaking world building.
A lot of the examples you're using is personal reflection.
How do you think about, for example, note taking in meetings?
Like maybe you have like granola or Gemini notes taking, you know, taking notes or and sort of putting it into Obsidian or.
And by the way, when I say notes, those could be meetings that you're not even in.
They could just be like, you know, Tommy met with Vince and they had this meeting and I want to put it in here.
Yes.
How do you think about that?
So it's a really good question.
So I think you can use these vaults however you want to use them in terms of like you could put any text you want in here.
If you want to put your granola meeting transcripts in here, you can put them in here and you have to just make sure, you know, maybe you're doing something like this.
Right.
So you're just like meetings and then you're like, OK, these are this is, you know, project one.
And then every time you do a meeting, you take your granola notes and you just put them in here.
Right.
So you're like meeting Greg Eisenberg, then plus then.
And then, you know, that file is created now and you can just drop your trend.
You can just drop your meeting notes in here.
And now that's in the vault.
And then you can pass that into the agent or the agent will discover it.
Right.
Especially if you start tagging like, oh, I'm going to tag this back to, you know, like my podcast or something there.
Now it's connected.
So now the the the agent, it has like more context and now it knows that this transcript is related to this other file.
Great.
I think that's up to you.
I think the way that you the amount of information that you put in here is up to how you want to use the vault and how you want to delegate to things to agents.
And maybe you even want to create different vaults for different purposes.
For me, for me, I use LLMs and agents as a way to increase my own level of understanding of subjects.
So I use it for a lot of reflection and things like that.
So I don't want an agent to write into the files.
Like I could easily get it to do that.
Like I could just say, like even here, I've asked it to write a description of some commands that I can talk about today.
But I don't I don't I don't want it to make a file to do this because I want to control all the files in my obsidian vault because I always wanted to pull from what I think about things.
Right.
Not what it thinks about things.
And if it starts making its own files in this vault, then I don't know, like is like when it's finding these patterns, is it finding patterns about things it's written or is it finding patterns about things I've written?
So I create a rule for myself, which is like a strict separation between these things.
I only wanted to write things on the side here and then I will take that and write what I think should be included.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah, go ahead.
No, I was just going to say, like, you know, I could see the power of just using it for your own reflections.
I can also see the power of, you know, AI is really good at, you know, going out on the Internet, finding information based on trends and stuff like that, distilling it in a way that you want and having that being put into your world is also interesting.
Yes, totally.
I think that and also like, let's say if you asked the Obsidian, if you asked the Cloud Code to go through your Obsidian file and generate ideas, which, you know, ideas for tools that you should build.
Well, then you can just like say, OK, cool.
If that's if I have an idea for a tool that I should build, just generate a description of that and then just build the tool.
Exactly.
Yeah.
I want to show this one.
So that it's like less on reflection.
Like, for example, like, you know, I'm I built this thing called idea browser dot com and every single day we give this validated startup idea.
Like someone theoretically can go and, you know, grab that information, put it in an Obsidian vault and then based on that, basically, you know, help them build the actual thing.
Right.
Totally.
Yes.
So I want to show you this because I think it'll really make it they'll take it out of the realm of reflection and into the realm of building.
But the only issue is this takes a bit.
So.
That's OK.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So the other thing is that with all of these, like with these commands, another pattern that I'm noticing is that they take a bit because it's reading so many files.
And I would say that's a big difference between using Obsidian and like are using cloud code with access to this Obsidian vault that I'm noticing is all of my requests are taking way longer.
And it's just because it's reading so much more.
So, like, look at this one.
So this is ideas demo.
So I'll run a comprehensive ideas generation.
Let me start by gathering vault structure and context in parallel.
And then if you look, it's really interesting to see what it's doing.
Right.
So it's like Obsidian orphans.
Right.
So it's it's it's it's like I guess orphans are like files that are on their own, not connected to things.
Right.
So that's interesting that it knows that Obsidian dead ends, Obsidian resolved, Obsidian tag counts.
So it's just trying to it's trying to figure out like some connection between all these things.
And then it says, OK, daily read.
So it's reading my daily notes.
Then it found this file called new context, which is new is this media company I'm working on.
Then it's like read file.
The other stuff context that that's podcast.
The other thing I would say to you guys is I do manage.
I write.
I create context files for projects that are pretty extensive.
I'll show you.
I was I didn't know if I was going to show this because it's very personal.
But like for the other stuff, look at this other stuff working context.
What shifted recently front loading profile by traveling to San Francisco, New York City to record guests.
This is super personal stuff.
But what is the other stuff?
The format core beliefs of the show.
Research is the foundation.
Solid.
The best conversations feel like discovery.
Solid.
You know, here's the team that's working on it.
And so what happens is this again, very personal, but this is context that it just pulled in.
So now it knows who's working on my podcast.
What are the what are the recent hypothesis hypotheses I'm exploring?
And it just got that information.
That's just like one of the things that did personal workflow context, super personal file.
But it shows like, you know, like what my daily schedules is like, you know, things that I have to do like in my personal life.
So it's like pulling that how I like to work, how I don't like to work.
Personal agent infrastructure is another thing.
Let's see what happens if I pull this up.
This is a project in which I want to take a step towards increasing my personal infrastructure workflow delegation.
However, you want to describe it with agents, understanding what it means to delegate to agents more and more.
Implementation approach.
So this is like what I'm writing about the file about how I'm thinking about using agents personally.
And again, that's an example of one of the files it's reading.
That's just one of them.
So you saw like the other stuff, the personal workflow, and it's factoring that all in to this task I've asked it to do, which is generate ideas for me.
Gathering data from your daily notes, calendar and vault structure.
This takes a moment since it's pulling from multiple sources.
Again, one of the things with this is that it's just going through a lot of information, man.
A lot of information.
So it takes longer.
You know, it's already been going for five minutes.
Right?
And so that's something I'm noticing.
But for me, that's what I want.
I want that.
I want a response from LLMs that is very, very contextual to the things that I'm writing about.
And I think a lot.
And I think that's how me and an agent can work best together, where I just focus on continually noting that my, the, the, where I'm currently at in terms of the projects I'm working on and what my understanding is and what I find interesting.
I want to maintain that and make it as current and as deep as possible.
So whenever I'm talking to an agent, it has the best representation at all times of who I am in that moment when I ask the agent for something.
Yeah.
I mean, that's the goal, right?
Yeah.
That's the question that we all should be asking of ourselves, which is, does the agent have the most up-to-date information on the projects, on my preferences and my dreams and my hopes and my goals?
Because you're, it's only as good as the up-to-date version of that.
Correct?
Yes.
One hundred percent.
The quality, the, the quality of information that the agent has entirely determines what it can do for you.
Right?
If it doesn't know a lot about you, it's not going to be able to do a lot for you.
But if it knows a lot, then it can, it can, it can do things for you that I think like even some of your, in some, it's kind of weird to say, but I mean like that you don't even know about yourself in ways.
I mean, it makes sense, right?
Because ultimately what this is doing, like to distill it to its core, it's connecting the dots.
Yes.
Obsidian and, obsidian and clod code here are, are connecting the dots.
Now, it's actually quite difficult as a, as a business owner or just as a personal, in our personal lives to connect the dots.
Like why do people in a lot of ways go to, you know, coaches, therapists?
Yes.
You know, if you go to a therapist and, you know, you have someone who is, you're doing most of the talking, right?
Think about it.
You're doing a lot of the reflection and the therapist and coach is sort of guiding you.
Totally.
That's, that's what this is doing in a lot of ways.
And I'm not saying by the way that don't go to your therapist, you know, just, but I'm, but my point is it helps, it helps you, helps you uncover what are their dots and how you can connect them.
Yeah, absolutely.
And for me, yeah, it's, it's just really exciting.
Um, and yeah, it's just, it's just a crazy time with computers.
So let's look at this, this thing finished.
So this is an idea generation report, vault relationship exploration.
This is, this is pretty extensive, right?
Like to get an idea report.
Like, I think this is, this is really going to show how we can move.
You move from reflection to something actionable.
So.
Structural highlights.
So again, this is just obsidian stuff, right?
Orphans worth noting.
There's some defense technology stuff here.
Just a theme that's growing in Canada.
Massive intellectual investment sitting in isolation.
Also orphan agentic software.
So orphan just means these are files.
I haven't really linked random notes.
I just wrote once or something.
Um, unresolved links that reveal latent interests, uh, hidden relationships.
Again, all reflection stuff.
Fine.
What's working.
Obsidian cloud code is a combined system is working for me.
This is producing genuine breakthroughs and thinking and output day per domain structure.
When enforced.
This is basically, I started, um, splitting my schedule where each day has a specific focus.
This is cool.
And this is very true.
The Greg Eisenberg episode as a forcing function.
It's compressing months of thinking about obsidian and agents into a clear thesis with demos.
Very true.
You know, coming on the show and doing this forced me to, um, synthesize everything I knew and present it.
But here's where we're going to the actionable stuff.
Tools to build.
The slash graduate slash command.
Daily note idea extractor.
Based on daily notes are full of idea.
Sorry.
Daily notes are full of idea tags and interesting thinking that never gets developed.
The vault has nine idea tags, but hundreds of undiscovered insights.
Build a command that scans recent daily notes, identifies ideas tagged or not, and prompts you to decide.
Create a standalone note, add to an existing file or dismiss.
This turns a daily note stream into a structured idea pipeline.
Obsidian vault for new.
It says, I just have to manage and set up a central obsidian vault for new.
What that means is in the same way that I'm creating this vault and it has all my ideas and my patterns and everything like that.
Um, why would I not create one for my team?
Where they like, as a team, we can go and ask this vault questions and we can all, uh, contribute to it.
Here we go.
Tools to start using.
What is this?
Types for all external documents.
Uh, interesting.
A time blocking act that enforces day, a time blocking app that enforces day per domain.
Meaning since I'm trying to focus on one thing each day, one aspect of my life, it's saying, why not create a time blocking app that forces you to do that?
Interesting.
Systems to implement.
One sentence in obsidian agent handles the rest.
This is literally the demo three version of the Greg Eisenberg prep.
You're already imagining it.
The next step is to actually building it.
Start small, right?
Schedule a call with person about topic this week in a daily note and have Otis or Claude bot or open claw, pick it up and handle it.
So it's saying maybe you can delegate right from the note itself is how I'm interpreting that.
Super interesting.
Yeah.
Just inline, inline delegation.
Like maybe that's even like a new UX pattern.
I don't even know.
Right.
That you could build into like these different tools.
Um, subjects to investigate.
Christopher Alexander's pattern language applied to digital spaces.
Interesting.
Um, black mountain college as a model for the stadium stadium is a physical space we have in Toronto authorless media as a concept, uh, how Shenzhen's hardware ecosystem actually works things to write and publish.
That'd be useful.
Context architecture essay.
The computer as a place software book will become fashion.
What Toronto theory actually is editorial thinking zine conversations to have.
This isn't, these are real people.
Aaron stadium workshop hosts about becoming an anchor of technical programming.
This is a space we have in Toronto to run again.
Another person program about making program.
The flagship series, Steph Ango obsidian CEO about the vault as a place.
Um, and so this is like, yeah, this is crazy.
It's, it's suggesting people I should meet right.
Top five high impact do now build the graduate command or do a manual weekly idea review.
Um, this is crazy, dude.
This is actually crazy.
Like, and the fact that it's in plain text and it just not be, it's not, there's no images.
It doesn't make it easy to read, but I kind of like it cause it's, it's like dressed down.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
I mean, I like that aesthetic cause I'm a nerd, but you could just say, you know, you
could, you could just say, obviously you could just say, can you turn this into a beautiful
readable HTML file that is on my desktop?
This is hard to read and it's going to do that.
Right.
Right.
So, I mean, if you don't, that says, if you don't like that, just do it however you want
to do it.
You know what I mean?
I like it like this and this kind of like this aesthetic.
Um, but yeah, that's how you can move out of reflection.
And of course, you know, of course we can also say like here, you know, if we don't,
if we don't want to do this, uh, we could also say like it recommended that slash graduate
command.
So I could just say, build the slash graduate command.
Right.
Which is interesting.
And is that how you started building a lot of your commands?
Like it, it sort of, it started suggesting it and you're like, just go build it.
Well, I started off actually like building them myself.
Like I'm like, Oh, trying to think about commands myself.
But then, yeah, I said, I started asking the agent like, well, wait a second, what commands
do you think would be interesting?
And, and just, and this might be useful.
Another thing that I like to do is I like to move to like higher levels of abstraction
when I'm using an LLM.
What I mean by that is I could say like, Oh, make a command that, um, tells me what I should
focus on each day.
And that's, that's like, um, a command that I thought of.
But when I, when I, another thing you can do is you can step back and I can say, based
on my obsidian vault and what you know about me form and understanding.
Of what you think my level of understand, like where you think my skill level is in terms
of a person and the projects that I'm working on.
And based on that suggest the kinds of commands I should use that would take me from the level
I'm at to a higher level.
Right.
Get like, you know, get it to suggest the commands for me instead of me suggesting the commands
and I could pick between them.
So look at this.
This is, this is, it was, this was the agent's idea based on what it read in my vault based
on the notes I'm taking.
Right.
Right.
So let's see what this is.
Daily note idea extractor ideas, insights, and original thinking accumulate in detail
in daily notes, but rarely graduate into standalone notes where it can, where they can compound
through backlinks.
This command scans recent daily notes surfaces, the best candidates and helps decide what to
promote into like an idea or something.
Right.
Sure.
So this is how it's going to work.
It scans all the recent daily notes.
It cross references with the existing vault.
It presents candidates.
It graduates selected ideas.
If, if creating a new standalone note, create the note in the vault route, write the note
as a mini essay or working document that captures the core claim or question context from the
daily note, where it originated connections to other vaults notes as backlinks.
Now, all this stuff, like it captures the core claim or question.
You might be looking at this and think like, okay, this is just the text that the agent
generated and it is, but also it hits differently for me because I know like I'm writing a lot
about these things.
I know, I know like even like the mini essay thing, these are words that mean specific things
to me, which is just so, it's just so crazy.
It's very contextual.
I know what it's talking about because I spend a lot of time in this tool and I spend a lot
of time writing.
So yeah, I created and it's going to create that command.
Right.
And it's like, that's, that's nuts because I'm just going about making notes and I have
this parallel agent that is looking at my notes and giving me ideas on how I can prove
my workflow, improve my life.
And then, and then not only can it just suggest it, it could just build the thing and it's
done.
And we have it right here slash graduate.
I could just hit it and it's going to run.
It's crazy.
If, if I'm open AI or anthropic, I'm buying obsidian.
Right.
Cause it's the missing link.
Yeah.
It's nuts.
It's the missing link.
Why?
The fact that there are people like you've sold me on this, by the way, I have, I've downloaded
obsidian.
I think it's a free tool, right?
Yes, it is.
Yeah.
Open sourced.
I've downloaded it, but I have not created my vault because I wanted you Vin to take me
through.
I knew that this was going to be great.
I knew that I would go through this.
This actually exceeded my expectations.
Like this is the, the fact like it makes no sense to the fact like that, if you are, if
you are using, if you are serious about using LLMs to take your ideas and put in and get
the most out of them, if you're serious about building, you know, what people are calling
a personal OS and you are not using a centralized note-taking tool like this that uses Markdown
as the foundation, then you are not using LLMs properly.
Yeah.
Or at least not at the limit.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
You're not getting the most out of it.
Yeah.
You're not getting the most out of it.
So I think what's, what's difficult about this is that it require, it does require a lot
of time and to actually set it up properly.
It requires like, yeah, I mean, it takes a lot of time and the UI is in an, is, is so
daunting in the sense that it's a blank canvas and it's not like, Hey, you should like write
your preferences over here or, you know, you kind of just have to, you have to come up
with these ideas yourselves.
Yes.
But that's still so amazing, right?
Because I mean, even when we work with other humans, we have to find a way to explain things
to them.
And I just think it's so cool that now we can work with these agents and we still have
to explain things to them, but we only need to explain them once because once we get it
down on into a file, we can always reference that file, that explanation of a project or a
preference or anything.
And it's always there and you can pass it in.
Yeah.
A file is like essentially perfect, a perfect memory.
Yes.
Right.
Human beings have memories.
Like we recall things.
Yes.
But there's tons of studies that show that what we remember in fact is completely different
than reality.
For example, when we went and got our, that haircut in Mississauga, I could have thought
that I had the best haircut, you know, that's what my memory remembers.
It was a great haircut, but who knows?
It could have been the worst haircut I had ever gotten.
Now, Obsidian or whatever tool you end up using, like, you know, if I had written, yes,
like the memory, the file, the markdown file is perfect so that when I link that or I recall
it, it is going to give me a perfect, you know, data point.
And the other thing about, you know, these files is that you hope, well, they're not biased.
Basically, they're as biased as the human being is in terms of writing the reflections.
Yes.
At that moment in time.
Yes.
It's crazy, man.
And yeah, it's just crazy.
And there's all, there's all of these different aspects to it.
There's the privacy of it and what that means.
There's the power of it.
The fact that now you can just work with these computers in natural language and just delegate
to them.
There's the fact that there's people like me that are, that are using these tools and
trying to figure out how to delegate stuff to agents in this way.
There's people that are like me that are even more hardcore in different ways and pushing
them.
And I just think it's such a crazy time to be alive because I think we are potentially
watching a fundamental shift in the human relationship to computers.
And it's just, I'm just really happy to be alive while this is happening.
And I'm curious, like, how is this all going to unravel?
Well, what's cool about this is 99.99% of people are not going to spend the time to actually
set up something like this and make it a part of their daily lives.
And the alpha, so to speak, is in terms of leading a more productive, happier, healthier, better,
more money-making career is in using something like this with an LLM.
I think so.
I'm not saying download Obsidian today and I have no affiliation or whatever with them,
but I'm saying like, pick a, it sounds like what we should all be doing.
And I'm talking, I'm giving myself this advice.
It's like, there's no excuse anymore for me not to be writing down and reflecting into
Markdown files.
Yes.
In a world that where LLMs use Markdown files is the oxygen.
Yes.
Like people think tokens are the oxygen.
Yes.
But they're not.
Yes.
The Markdown files are the memories.
Like think about what a human being is.
Yes.
You know, is a human being the energy of a human being or is it the memories of, you know,
what we recall, you know?
Yes.
I mean, that's like a philosophical question and maybe it's a bit of, you know, a bit of
both, but it's, you know, I think that there's something really, really fascinating
about MD files as an underrated about them in order to have a true computer experience in
today's day and age.
Yeah.
There's definitely something going on here.
Some fundamental shift.
Yeah.
It's awesome.
Yeah.
And like I have bad, my work, you know, I'm learning in real time, right?
Like, and I, I don't have the right vocabulary to even explain this.
Yes.
And neither do I, man.
Neither do I.
I'm trying to, I'm trying to figure it out in real time.
That's, that's why I think like, I know I show something and, and for me, I'll do something
or I'll see something.
And my friends are like, they kind of laugh because I'll just be sitting at my computer,
just tripping out.
And I think it's because I really like computers and I cannot believe that this is possible.
I cannot believe that I can just be making notes on my computer.
Like I have been since I was a kid.
And then all of a sudden this agent can scan through it and build things because of it and,
and like connect patterns that I could never see.
It's nuts, man.
It's nuts.
And, and at the root of it, you're right.
It's just a collection of interrelated Markdown files.
Yeah.
Cool, man.
I appreciate you.
I don't know if you can see my mind, but my mind is blown right now.
Thank God.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I wanted to do right by you.
I also just like, I say this every time, man, but I'm just gonna keep always saying it
to you all the time.
I really, really, really, really appreciate everything that you do.
I think your pattern recognition and your pattern matching is like, like really,
really underrated.
I think there's a lot of things that you do that.
I don't think it's difficult to see if you're not really paying attention.
I just want to say like, thank you for, for everything that you do.
You're always putting on like new voices on your show.
I see it.
I really appreciate it.
And it's just been, it's an honor to know you and yeah, just thanks for the opportunity.
Thanks for everything, man.
I appreciate you, Vin.
You're a legend.
I'll include links for where to follow criminally underfollowed internet, Vin on, on X, on his
YouTube show podcast in the show notes and description.
You can go and check him out there.
People, please play with some of these tools and let me know what you think.
Let Vin know what you think.
Please.
And Vin, I will beg you to come back on the show another time.
And I hope you come back on again.
For sure, man.
Thank you.
Thank you.