GREG ISENBERG - how to use obsidian + claude code to build a 24/7 personal operating ...

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 Claude 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 gonna be a super impactful way because you're gonna get better ideas At the right time the right moment and it's gonna 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 gonna 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 you 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, and it's gonna go and do this That's really cool. That's that's something that's 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 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 chat GPT 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 if it can do For you and the better the faster you can delegate to it Okay, 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 slot 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 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 and and when I work on this over days I'm not gonna 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 it's okay. 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 I 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 gonna be To do dash app. Here it is. Oh 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 gonna read this file and it's gonna 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 it. That's weird. That's weird. Yeah, that's very weird And so I 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 make into? 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 like people there's a lot of people who really really like of using obsidian and Tools like obsidian because of this ability to form into relationships 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 that here these are each one of these circles is a file and In 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 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 gonna show up on the screen here, right? But that's part of doing demos like this, which is what you're kind of weird and interesting But you can see personal agent infrastructure late new links to like a gentic AI. There's like a link here to telegram There's a link here to like Toby With the founder of Shopify, there's a link to like presence log Claude bought, you know and then here's like I have a podcast too called 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 Write notes on time constraints how I use obsidian which is just kind of interesting So if I'm listening, I love you too, then 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 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 Here 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 in 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 in every single Note, you're making across these different domains and and in seeing that for the first time can be like a huge light bulb effect It can cause like huge progressions and you're 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 here's what I'm 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 on 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 in a 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 gonna read a whole bunch of files about where I'm currently at done Like I've already pre-loaded I've already pre-loaded in all this context now so you can see it's gonna 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 gonna get all that information done So I can use slash today Which is a morning review pulls calendar tasks I messages 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 I messages and things Like that, but it's miss It's that's 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 you can it can it can more effectively give you Information about what you should do or not do or 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 a 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 LLM's as a thinking partner That's my favorite way of using LLM's I know people like to use agents and LLM's 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 here's a command to have it answers a question the way I would it builds a vote voice profile from the vaults 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 a pressure test current beliefs using the vaults 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 as a as in my skills I want to make sure that you know, the POV I have is an overly bias 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 and 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 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. I'm like films. I should watch Products I should buy again all influenced by like 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 gonna show up in the end I can't even control what is gonna show up on the screen and I I've just a dumb question like all those commands that we saw Is that? commands that you created or is that what obsidian created that those are commands that I created and You can create them very easily by just asking Claude code to create a specific command. Mm-hmm 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 VINs Skills if that's yeah for sure Yeah, so you can see here. What I did was I just type 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 all trace how your relationship with obsidian has evolved Let me start by building a vocabulary map and searching across the vault So it when you have a 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 just 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 to this out I now have everything I need to construct this trace. Here's the full evolution trace how I use 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 Canopia for spatial mapping Physical notebooks for cognitive friction and 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 bi-directional linking is not that useful, but I don't know then It says the chosen tool Originally I was back ring link it says here how I use obsidian note a pivotal realization about back linking Originally, I was back linking 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 it out of my head and then link to those notes. So it's just it's just like pulling from Things I've written and it's forming this Historical at 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 4 January 2026 a month of explosive building Everything still required and then like everything still requires me to actively prompt and manage each section session The next unlocked is figuring out how to get agents tasks 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 me. This is a very useful thing for me to understand how my Use of this tool is evolving and it's just 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 I can like reflect on the different things? I'm learning. I just think this is insane that And 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 and like like I can just like now right in here And I'm 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 reflect, 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 into your life Yeah, I think For me, it's really about there's there's two reasons that I think reflection is interesting and making notes a lot or 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 to 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 a mate 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 now 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 How does this relate to open claw because if you think of open claw? it's essentially You know at the best case an extension of you yeah, I could go and do things, you know Independently Slash based on your guidance. So how can you use? commands obsidian and open claw 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 as 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 gonna look through what I care about and then it's gonna 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 as a dedicated Greg Eisenberg No, no, not a two. So the recommendation is no not a 2 p.m. But you might not need a separate meeting at all Yeah, that's about that's actually the correct answer. How does that relate to open claw? well Open claw 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 open claw can do is in the same way? I just did this command open claw 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 open claw access to your second brain is Scary yeah scary and I would say that is the Fundamental The the weird element of this technology I would say and I have purposely given Obsidian, I mean sorry the cloud 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 gonna be very interesting to see how privacy as a concept evolves and changes and what we fight for or Don't fight for and like the in the future of our society in 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 it's a toss-up You know, I could type the demo version, but who knows what's gonna be shown on screen, you know What other commands do you want to show So there's Connect which is a lot. It allows me to take two domains and connect them using the vaults 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 let's connect these two concepts so notes and filmmaking Notes and filmmaking his neighborhood. So I was like 35 film watch list 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 The a lot of the examples you're using is personal reflection. Yeah, do you think about? You know For example, no taking in meetings. Like maybe you have like granola or Gemini notes taking you know taking notes or and in sort of putting it into obsidian or And by the way, when I say notes then 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, okay, these are this is you know project one and then every time you do meeting You take your granola notes and you just put them in here, right? So you're like meeting Greg Eisenberg Vin Plus Vin and then you know That file is created now and you can just drop your Trent 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 gonna 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 Trent 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 two things to agents and maybe you even want to create different? vaults for different purposes for me for me I use LLM's 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 and and write what I think Should be included Right. So yeah. Yeah, go ahead. No, I was just gonna 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 ask the Cloud code to go through your obsidian file on and generate ideas which You know ideas for tools that you should build Well, then you can just like say, okay 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 so exactly Yeah, I want to show this one So that it's like less on reflection like for example like, you know, I'm a I built this thing called idea browser comm and every single day we give this validated startup idea 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 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 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 okay daily read so it's reading my daily notes Then it found this file called new context which is new as this media company 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 gonna 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 is 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 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 bold 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 that's something I'm noticing but For me, that's what I want. I want that. I want I want a response from LLM's 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 could 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? That's the question that we all should be asking of ourselves Which is yes 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, 100% 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 gonna 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 city in an obsidian and Claude code here 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 So 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 just it's just really exciting 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 gonna show how we can move you move from reflection to have 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 Unresolved links that reveal latent interests 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 Splitting my schedule where each day has a specific focus 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 Synthesize everything I knew and presented 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 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 contribute to it Here we go tools to start using What is this types for all external documents uh interesting a time blocking app that enforces date 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 3 version of the greg eisenberg 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 in line in line 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 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 tarun 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 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 because it's It's like dressed down. You know what I mean? Yeah, I mean, I like that aesthetic because 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. 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 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'd 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 an 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? 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 uh, 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 claimer 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 claimer 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 create it 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 improve my workflow improve my life And then and then not only can it just suggest it you just build the thing And it's done And we have it right here slash graduate. I could just hit it And it's gonna run. It's crazy If if i'm open ai or anthropic I'm buying obsidian Obsidian Right because 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 I knew that this was gonna 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. It makes no sense 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 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 Yeah 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 uh, like Yeah, I mean it takes a lot of time and and 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 it 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 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 There's the privacy of the data and there's the privacy of the data 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 um 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 in different ways and 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 this is all going to unravel. Well, what's 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 in 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 this advice it's like There's no excuse anymore for me not to be writing down and reflecting Yes 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 fires are the memories like think about what a human being is Yes, you know Is a human being The the energy of a human being or is it the memories of it? You know what we recall, you know 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 And underrated about them in order to To have a true Computer experience and 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 word, 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 underrated I think there's a lot of things that you do that I don't think it's like difficult to see if you're not really paying attention I I just want to say like thank you for uh 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 your legend. I'll include links for where to follow criminally underfollowed internet vin On on x on his youtube show Uh podcast in the show notes and description. You can go and check him out there uh people Please play with some of these tools Uh, and let me know what you think let vin know what you think please and uh 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