Obsidian + Claude Code is Beyond Useful - It's Transformative

Leveraging "developer tools" as a powerful pipeline for productivity and growth

One of the first experiments that I ran was to combine Obsidian with Claude Code. This proved to be a powerful combo!

Obsidian is a note taking tool. It’s a popular tool that many people use to power their Personal Knowledge Management (PKM). It not only takes notes, but also allows for uni-directional and bi-directional linking of notes. As you use it, and create links, a cloud of knowledge started to emerge with ideas, topics, and thoughts all linked together as an emergent space is created that reflects what you are working on and thinking about, almost list magic. One of the best features of Obsidian is that all the notes you take are kept in a folder. You write notes and it saves them as markdown documents. Your notes are local and not stored on some server on the cloud. It’s this feature that makes it work so well with Claude Code.

Claude Code is Anthropic’s AI that is intended to be a coding partner for creating software with AI. As such, it is designed to be pointed at a folder of code and it can then read, analyze, and reason about the code in that folder. It’s a powerful tool that programmers use to improve how they code, find bugs, test their software, etc. But since Obsidian also stores all of it’s note data into a folder, you can also run Claude Code on top of your notes.

When you do this, magic happens! Claude Code can read through your notes and provide all sorts of helpful comments, find patterns, help you organize, and do really great things to help you with your notes. But that is just the start. If you intentionally use Obsidian with the Claude Code integration in mind, you can elevate this magic to sublime levels. Let’s dive in!

The Obsidian Setup

The key plug-ins:

• Periodic Notes plug-in - This plug-in sets up the system for creating daily., weekly. monthly, quarterly, and annual notes. These are intended to be planning and tracking spaces for these time periods. I use them in the following way:

  • Daily Notes - Daily intentions, rapid logging of what happens during the day, meeting notes, todos, reflection on the day at the end, habit tracking, emojis and context for AI. Use this to set your intentions, plan your day, rapid log everything that happens, including ideas, thoughts, frustrations, wins, etc. Put the context of your day and how you felt and what you accomplished here. The more detail, the more useful the AI coach will be.

  • Weekly Notes - What to surface from monthly notes to work on *this week* -> a quick weekly plan of what I want to accomplish this week (based on my Monthly Plan)

  • Monthly Notes - Monthly planning and tasks -> Bullet Journal style -> Based on my ORKs, ideally

  • Quarterly Notes - Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) -> the two or three top things that I want to accomplish this quarter and how I will measure success

  • Templates for each of these note types to provide guidance and structure

• TaskNotes Plug-in - Track tasks and todos

  • Track tasks and TODOs and surface them in a variety of views (task view, kanban, etc.)

These are all Community Plug-ins available for Obsidian and are core to my system.

The AI Set Up

Claude Code

I use Claude Code (https://claude.com/product/claude-code) because it is more powerful than the desktop version. It is intended for developers, but I’ve found that the text-based Obsidian workflows fit into this space nicely. I wanted to experiment with AI that could work in the context of a folder, and Claude Code is specifically designed for that. In this case, that folder is my Obsidian Vault.

CLAUDE.md

There is a special file that you can create at the root of your notes folder. It is called CLAUDE.md. Claude knows to look for this file, and it will load the contents of this file into memory every time so it can start with some context when you ask it questions or to do things. This is huge! Instead of having to include a long and detailed prompt every time, you can start with a huge amount of context to pass along to Claude without having to type it in each time.

This is the only file in the root folder of my Obsidian vault. All my other notes are in folders and sub-folders -- I use a modified PARA structure.

CLAUDE.md is the heart of this system and what makes it so powerful and transformative. In this file, you will add all the context that you can to make the AI be able to serve you better and have more specific, targetted, actionable advice than it could with just general prompting. The better it knows you, the better it can help.

So what did I put into my CLAUDE.md? Here are the high level headers and some content:

## About me and my family
- [details about me, my family, where I live, my time zone, and any personal information I would like for Claude to know about to help me better]
## Where I work
- [I add details about my job, position, things that would be helpful to provide context for my professional career]
## My Goals
- [details about my short, medium, and long term goals. This is here so Claude can help me stay on track with what I want to achieve over time]
- I also put down any commitments or agreements that I should keep in mind
## AI Instructions
For this Obsidian Vault, any files generated by Claude will go under the folder “AI-GEN” so the rest of the vault remains free of AI generated content. This is to keep my own thought separate from those generated by AI. Any files that are created will include the date in YYYY-MM-DD format as the first part of the filename followed by a hyphen and then the title of the note so things can sort chronologically.
### How you can support me as an AI coach, mentor, and guide-
- more context on things that I struggle with or would like help with to remember, be called out on, etc. The more detail you put here, the better!
### Personal Development Goals
- add any personal development work that you are doing here.
### How you can support me as an assistant
Please do keep track of appointments, things I need to get done, thing I might be forgetting, and any events that I need to remember like birthdays, anniversaries, etc. I’ll keep a file called [[Nori’s Periodic Calendar]] that you can use to remind me.
### Use Daily Notes for key context
I will be using my Daily Notes for logging my day, thoughts, meetings, etc. Please focus on using those to really understand my daily activity and focus on the day, week, month, and quarter. Daily notes are located here: ...
### Track my enrolled courses and learning programs
I track courses and learning programs in [[Courses and Learning Programs]]. Please:
- Remind me of open/in-progress courses during weekly planning
- Ask about course progress during monthly reviews
- If a course has been in-progress for 3+ months with no updates, ask if it should be paused or dropped
- Celebrate course completions and ask how I’m applying the learnings
- Connect course content to relevant Daily Note reflections
### Currently Reading
The books I am currently reading are in a file titles: [[Currently Reading]]. This is the stuff that I am most intereted in NOW, and can be referenced to help cement the knwoeldge or implement what I am reading about. ... it’s useful for the AI to know what you are reading and taking notes on!

I won’t get into too much detail about how I set this up, that will be a topic for a separate post on how I set up CLAUDE.md. I just wanted to show want is possible for now. I think the above gives a real good idea about how I’ve set up my CLAUDE.md. It’s all in plain English as I explain my own personal context that I would like to give to the AI for it to help me in my work and life.

Dedicated AI Output Folder

You will see that I have told Claude in the CLAUDE.md above where to put all of it’s generated files by default. This is to keep AI output separate from my own writing. Part of this journey is to understand how my human activity can work alongside the AI output, and I want to keep them separate so there is a hard line between the two. In my case, I do not want AI to write my notes for me, that’s part of my journey as a writer to do myself. But I do want to see what AI produces for writing prompts, ideas, transcripts and summaries of videos, etc. so there is a dedicated folder for those things.

The Magic

Now that all that is set up, what is possible?

daily check-ins

Daily checkins at various points in the day are helpful to keep me accountable and on-track. The AI can see my Daily Notes, the intentions that I set, and the meetings, work done, and thoughts that I’ve had throughout the day and remind me about tasks I need to finish, keep me motivated if it detects flagging energy, recommend a walk to refresh, etc.

accountability partner

The AI can also be a wonderful accountability partner. Make sure in the CLAUDE.md to state something like “please keep me accountable to my goals for the day. Your job is not to make me happy, but to keep me on-track and in the flow. Call me on any detected avoidance of tasks or any other issues that you think I am not seeing or ignoring.” or something like that. Be creative and align with the goals that. you want in an accountability partner!

coach and mentor

One of my favorite prompts is, at the end of the day: “How do you think I did today?” and it will give me a really great summary of how I did, how it stacks up against my weekly, monthly, and quarterly goals, and what I can improve to better align. It coaches me through rough spots and difficulties as well, reminding me to deal with issues and tensions in a healthy way.

bias buster

Another useful use is to prompt something like: “In my meeting today with X, there was some tension about Y. What do you think I am not seeing based on what you know about me and the stakeholders of this project? Are there biases that I should look at that might be limiting my choices if I stay unaware of them?”

synthesis engine

Another really fun prompt is something like: “Looking at the past week, what patterns and connections can you see as a story or thread that is running through the days?” and that tends to surface meta patterns and things I might be too in the weeds to notice, and it’s nice to have that advice to reflect upon.

personal assistant

One fun prompt that I’ve been using lately has been something like “create a TaskNote for me to write an article about (topic). Please add some links to YouTube videos and articles that might be relevant for research into that topic and a high level writing prompt. Schedule this for next week.”. Then the AI goes off and creates an amazingly detailed TaskNote containing my task, links to videos to watch (it find them and adds them!), articles to read, and it gives me a quick outline as a writing prompt. A super time-saving use of AI that seems to support my writing goals and while not taking away my agency to actually do the task itself, just the administrative background stuff that one could imagine a personal assistant doing for you.

Closing thoughts

I’ve just started scratching the surface of what I can do with diligent rapid logging of my day, week, month, and quarter into Periodic Notes and using CLAUDE.md to set up the context necessary to process all that in a personally meaningful and powerful way. I’ll dive more deeply into some of the bits mentioned above as I evolve them further and get deeper into what’s possible.

I think the initial setup to have Claude only write into my “AI-GEN” folder was a good one. All the other folders around it contain my periodic notes, meeting notes, and other notes that are all created by me -- even these blog posts. This journey is all about discovering what it means to be human in the Age of AI, and I think, for me, writing is the “human” activity that gives me meaning and joy, so that is the critical part that I will not have AI do for me. Having it do research, create tasks for me seems like it helps me to get to the actual work of reading, note-taking, synthesis, and writing faster.

I am finding the accountability, mentoring, and writing support to be a powerful combination for my productivity and focus. There were a few “meta-moments” during the past week that I’ll also write about soon!