How I Use Obsidian + Claude Code to Run My Life

What It Covers

Developer and creator Vin demonstrates how pairing Obsidian — a markdown-based note vault — with Claude Code creates a personalized AI thinking partner. By building custom slash commands that read interconnected files, users feed agents deep context about their life, projects, and patterns, enabling faster delegation and idea generation.

Key Questions Answered

• •Context files over repeated prompts: Instead of re-explaining projects each Claude Code session, create dedicated markdown files per project and reference them with a single command. Vin uses a slash context command that reads multiple files simultaneously — project descriptions, daily notes, and backlinked files — loading a complete personal context in seconds rather than minutes of re-explanation.
• •Obsidian CLI unlocks graph-aware AI: The Obsidian CLI passes not just file contents to Claude Code but also the relational graph between files — which notes link to which. This lets the agent detect cross-domain patterns across months of notes that a human cannot manually surface, such as recurring startup themes appearing across unrelated daily entries.
• •Custom slash commands automate daily operations: Vin builds commands like slash today (pulls calendar, iMessages, and a week of daily notes into a prioritized plan), slash close day (extracts action items and updates confidence ratings on hypotheses), and slash drift (compares stated intentions against actual behavior over 30 to 60 days of vault history).
• •Vault-generated idea reports replace manual brainstorming: Running a slash ideas command triggers Claude Code to scan the entire vault — orphaned notes, unresolved links, daily entries, project context files — and output a structured report covering tools to build, people to contact, essays to write, and systems to implement, all derived from the user's own existing writing.
• •Strict human-only writing rule preserves pattern integrity: Vin enforces a rule where Claude Code never writes directly into the Obsidian vault. If the agent populates files, pattern-detection commands conflate the agent's thinking with the user's own. Keeping all vault content human-authored ensures that when Claude Code surfaces patterns, those patterns reflect genuine personal thinking evolution.