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. And 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. OK, so first is what is Cloud Code? So Cloud Code is this 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. So I can say make a file or make a file on my desktop that says hello, Greg, and plain text. 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 create that file. 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 control and do things on your computer, that means that whatever you can describe to it, it can start to do. And so 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, I write some super long description about a particular project or I have 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 over and over and over again. A lot of people are using like Cloud or Chat Gbt on the web and it has things like memory. But you can't 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 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 faster you can delegate to it. So now, even if I, let's say I had like, let's say I wrote like a big project description here, right? Create a file that describes a project about to do list app that is very important. Very minimally designed and reads from all of my calendar MI messages and my Slack and interprets it into a task list of tasks that it thinks that I should do. I don't know, some idea, right? So now 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. Sorry, Greg, let's say. Yeah. And 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 okay. It's not like game changing. And the issue is they don't have, 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 it can pass this in. But 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 - here it is. Now I didn't need to explain the file again. 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 also a Markdown file. I should do my own fundamental analysis 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 in. Oh, 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 make inter, 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 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 that 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 everything is 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's 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 what you're kind of weird and interesting. But you can see personal agent infrastructure links to like, agentech 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, cloud bot, 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, right? So it's on time constraints. How I use obsidian, which is just kind of interesting. So if I'm listening to it, I love you too. If I'm listening to his show and I'm picking up different patterns, I'm going to be like, 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 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 works more like the way your brain works. Your brain connects these patterns all the time. Here's the 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 and startups or in this particular project you're working on in every single note you're making across these different domains? And in seeing that for the first time, can be like a huge light bulb effect. It can cause huge progressions and you're learning and you're understanding on 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 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 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 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 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 read me, 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. A post 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, 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 more effectively give you information about what you should do or not do or it can more effectively make decisions on what should be in your calendar or not in your calendar. Here's another one, slash close day. End of day processing, extracts action items, surfaces, vault connections, checks, confidence markers, and 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, I really have a novel way of viewing things. So let's see here. So ghost, here's a command to have. It answers the 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. A pressure test 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 as in my skills, I want to make sure that the POV I have is an 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, 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 my stated attention against actual behavior over 30 to 60 days. Surface is what I am avoiding. Ideas, people on this podcast, the listeners will probably like this one. Deep 30-day vault skin with cross-domain pattern deconate detection and graph analysis to generate ideas across all domains. This gives me not just ideas on things I should work on. It gives me ideas for tools and things like this, but it also gives me ideas on films I should watch, products I should buy, again, all influenced by things I'm writing about in my vaults. 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 can't even control what is going to show up on the screen. And I have just a dumb question. 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-- include in the show notes and in the description, just like a link where people can click to get access to some of Venn's skills if that's-- Yeah, for sure. Totally. 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 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 let it run. And what it's doing is it says all trace how your relationship with Obsidian has evolved. Let me start by building a vocabulary map and searching across a vault. 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 something that I would never be able to do on my own. And to read all of these files, just know 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 Obsidian. First appeared January 11, 2025, time span 13 months. That's in relation to this vault, specifically, meaning all the files in here. It says, pre-volts December 2024, the essay, how I take notes in the Western of Toronto, dated December 1, 2024. Discribes a complete system where Obsidian plays no role at all. The system is audio dumps via Mac Whisper, LLM dialogue loops, Kenopio for spatial mapping, physical notebooks for cognitive friction, fusion 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 draw 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 by directional linking is not that useful, but I don't know. Then it says the chosen tool. Originally I was back wrinkling, 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 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 startups. I can do this with a particular project with foods, my relationships, like a hobby, anything. And then phase four, January 20, 20, 26, a month of explosive building. Everything still requires me to actively prompt and manage each session. The next unlock is figuring out how to get agents tasked to run out thematically. 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. 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. Even as a parent, I can reflect on the different things I'm learning. I just think this is insane. 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, like I can just like now right in here, and 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, 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 inserting reflection into your everyday life. Because a lot of people-- we're moving from meeting to meeting. We're busy. We're parents. 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. 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 of is interesting. One is that it's great to be able to look back on them. For me, now obviously, I can use an agent. But for me to go back and see these notes and realizing that, oh, I'm a person that's continually changing. My skill is continually changing. Projects are continually evolving. 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 too. A reason I like to make notes a lot is because that's how I generate ideas. 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 if you want to cultivate 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 formed 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 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 things you can delegate, and the amount of things you can build. I hope that was a good answer. How does this relate to OpenClock? Because if you think of OpenClock, it's essentially, at the best case, an extension of you, that could go and do things independently, slash based on your guidance. So how can you use commands, obsidian, and OpenClock, and reflection harmoniously? Yes, so I think if you look at, 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 20 a 2 p.m. And what this does is, of course, you 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 as a dedicated Greg Eisenberg note. So the recommendation is no not a 2 p.m. but you might not need a separate meeting at all. Yeah, that's actually the correct answer. How does that relate to OpenClock? Well, OpenClock 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 OpenClock can do is, in the same way I just did this command, OpenClock 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 a deeper understanding of me. And now, instead of 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. 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 OpenClock 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, 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 going to be very interesting to see how privacy as a concept evolves and changes in 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 a toss-up. 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 Vaults link graph. So I can just say I did one here. And I just asked it to connect filmmaking and worldbuilding. And so it goes through and it reads all these different files. And then it can start to say, OK, let's connect these two concepts. So notes in filmmaking-- notes in 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 noticed something specific and asked 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 can 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, 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? Maybe you have granola or Gemini notes, taking notes or putting it into Obsidian or whatever. By the way, when I say notes, those could be meetings that you're not even in. They could just see Tommy met with Vince and they had this meeting and I want to put it in here. Yes. How do you think about that? It's a really good question. 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. You have to just make sure maybe you're doing something like this. You're just like meetings and then you're like, okay, this is project one. Every time you do a meeting, you take your granola notes and you just put them in here. You're like meeting, Greg, Eisenberg, Vin, plus Vin. That follow is created now and you can just drop your meeting notes in here. Now that's in the vault and then you can pass that into the agent or the agent will discover it. I'm going to tag this back to my podcast or something. Now it's connected. Now the agent, it has 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 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, I use LLMs and agents as a way to increase my own level of understanding of subjects. I use it for a lot of reflection and things like that. I don't want an agent to write into the files. I could easily get it to do that. I could just say, even here, I've asked it to write a description of some commands that I can talk about today. 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, not what it thinks about things. If it starts making its own files in this vault, then I don't know 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? I create a rule for myself, which is a strict separation between these things. I only want it to write things on the side here. I will take that and write what I think should be included. Right? Yeah, go ahead. No, I was just going to say, I could see the power of just using it for your own reflections. I can also see the power of AI is really good at 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, let's say, if you asked the Cloud Code to go through your obsidian file and generate ideas, which ideas for tools that you should build, then you can just say, "Okay, cool. 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. For example, I built this thing called ideabrowser.com. Every single day we give this validated startup idea. One theoretically can go and grab that information, put it in an obsidian vault, and then, basically, help them build the actual thing, right? Totally. Yes. I want to show you this because I think it'll really make it, it'll take it out of the realm of reflection and into the realm of building, but the only issue is this takes a bit. That's what it is. The other thing is that with all of these commands, another pattern that I'm noticing is that they take a bit because it's reading so many files. I would say that's a big difference between using Cloud Code with access to this obsidian vault that I'm noticing is all of my requests are taking way longer. It's just because it's reading so much more. Look at this one. This is ideas demo. I'll run a comprehensive ideas generation. Let me start by gathering vault structure and context in parallel. If you look, it's really interesting to see what it's doing. It's like obsidian orphans. It's like, I guess orphans are like files that are on their own, not connected to things. That's interesting that it knows that. Obsidian dead ends, obsidian resolved, obsidian tag counts. It's trying to figure out some connection between all these things. Then it says, "Okay, daily read." It's reading my daily notes. Then it found this file called New Context, which is new as this media company on work on. Then it's like read file, the other stuff context 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 didn't know if I was going to show this because it's very personal, but 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. What is the other stuff? The format, core beliefs of the show. Research is the foundation, solid. The best conversations feel like discovery, solid. Here's the team that's working on it. What happens is this, again, very personal, but this is context that it just pulled in. Now, it knows who's working on my podcast. What are the recent hypotheses I'm exploring? It just got that information. That's just one of the things it did. Personal workflow context. Super personal file. It shows what my daily schedule is like, things that I have to do in my personal life. It's 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. Identification approach. This is what I'm writing about, the file about how I'm thinking about using agents personally. Again, that's an example. One of the files it's reading. That's just one of them. You saw 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 both 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. It takes longer. It's already been going for five minutes. 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. I think a lot. I think that's how me and an agent can work best together. I just focus on continually noting 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. 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. That's the goal. That's the question that we all should be asking 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 it's only as good as the up-to-date version of that, correct? Yes, 100%. The quality of information that the agent has entirely determines what it can do for you. If it doesn't know a lot about you, it's not going to be able to do a lot for you. It knows a lot, then it can do things for you that I think, even some of you are in some kind of weird to say, but you don't even know about yourself in ways. It makes sense, right? Because ultimately, what this is doing, to distill it to its core, it's connecting the dots. Yes. Obsidian and cloud code here are connecting the dots. Now, it's actually quite difficult 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 coaches, therapists. Yes. If you go to a therapist, and 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 guiding you. That's what this is doing in a lot of ways. I'm not saying, by the way, that don't go to your therapist. But my point is, it helps you uncover what are their dots and how you can connect them. Yeah, absolutely. And for me, it's just really exciting. It's just a crazy time with computers. So let's look at this. This thing finished. This is an idea generation report, vault relationship exploration. This is pretty extensive, right? Like, to get an idea report, like, I think 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 orphaned, agentic software. So orphaned 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 went enforced. This is basically, I started 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 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. So 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. Interesting. A time-blocking app that enforces 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 arrests. 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. Write, "Schedule a call with person about topic this week in a daily note and have Otis or Claudebot or OpenClaude 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 delegation. Like, maybe that's even like a new UX pattern. I don't even know, right, that you could build into these different tools. 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. How Shen Zenz 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, "Zeen. Conversations to have." These are real people. Aaron, stadium workshop host about becoming an anchor of technical programming. This is a space we have in Toronto to ruin. Again, another person, program about making program the flagship series, "Steph Ango" of City and CEO about the vault as a place. So this is like, yeah, this is crazy. It's suggesting people I should meet. Top five high impact do now. Build the graduate command or do a manual weekly idea review. This is crazy, dude. This is actually crazy. The fact that it's in plain text and it just not viewed. There's no images. It doesn't make it easy to read, but I kind of like it because it's like dressed down. I mean, I like that aesthetic because I'm a nerd. 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. If you don't like that, just do it however you want to do it. I like it like this and this kind of like this aesthetic. But yeah, that's how you can move out of reflection. Of course, we can also say, if we don't want to do this, we could also say it recommended that slash graduate command. So I could just say, "Build the slash graduate command." Which is interesting. And is that how you started building a lot of your commands? It started suggesting it and you're like, "Just go build it." Well, I started off actually building them myself. I'm like, "Oh, trying to think about commands myself." But then, yeah, I started asking the agent, "Well, wait a second. What commands do you think would be interesting?" And this might be useful. Another thing that I'd like to do is I like to move to higher levels of abstraction when I'm using an LLM. What I mean by that is I could say, "Oh, make a command that tells me what I should focus on each day." And that's like a command that I thought of. But 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 understanding, 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 of that to a higher level. Get it to suggest the commands for me instead of me suggesting the commands that I could pick between them. So look at this. This is the agent's idea based on what it read in my vault, based on the notes I'm taking. 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 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. 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 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. All this stuff, it captures the core claim or question. You might be looking at this and thinking, "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 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 and prove my life. And then not only can it just suggest that 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. That's crazy. If I'm open AI or anthropic, I'm buying Obsidian. Right? Because it's the missing link. Yeah, it's nuts. It's the missing link. The fact that there are people, like you've sold me on this, by the way, I've downloaded Obsidian. I think it's a free tool, right? Yeah, it is. It's open sourced. I've downloaded it, but I have not created my fault because I wanted you, Vin. I knew that this was going to be great. I knew that I would go through this. This actually exceeded my expectations. The fact, like it makes no sense to me. The fact that if you are serious about using LLMs to take your ideas and get the most out of them, if you're serious about building what people are calling a personal OS, and you are not using a centralized node-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, exactly. You're not getting the most out of it. I think what's difficult about this is that it does require a lot of time to actually set it up properly. It requires, like, yeah, I mean, it takes a lot of time and the UI is so daunting and the sense that it's a blank canvas. It's not like, hey, you should write your preferences over here, or you kind of just 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. 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 onto 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 essentially perfect, a perfect memory, 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 in reality. For example, when we went and got that haircut in Mrs. Saga, I could have thought that I had the best haircut. 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, if I had written the memory, the file, the markdown file is perfect. When I link that or I recall it, it is going to give me a perfect data point. The other thing about these files is that you hope, well, they're not biased, basically. There is bias as the human being is in terms of writing the reflections at that moment and time. Yes. It's crazy, man. Yeah, it's just crazy. 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 using these tools and trying to figure out how to delegate stuff to agents in this way. There's people like me that are even more hardcore in different ways and pushing them. 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. I'm just really happy to be alive while this is happening and I'm curious, 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 lives. 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 of City in today and I have no affiliation or whatever with them, but I'm saying, it sounds like what we should all be doing and I'm giving myself this advice. There's no excuse anymore for me not to be writing down and reflecting into markdown files in a world where LLMs use markdown files as the oxygen. People think tokens are the oxygen, but they're not. The markdown files are the memories. Think about what a human being is. Is a human being the energy of a human being or is it the memories of what we recall? That's a philosophical question and maybe it's a bit of both, but 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. I'm learning in real time, right? I don't have the right vocabulary to even explain this. Yes. And I don't do what I've been. I'm trying to figure out in real time. That's why I think I know I show something and for me, I'll do something or I'll see something. My friends are like, they kind of laugh because I'll just be sitting at my computer just tripping out. 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 all of a sudden, this agent can scan through it and build things because of it and connect patterns that I could never see. It's not, it's not. 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 say this every time, man, but I'm just going to 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 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 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 just an honor to know you and yeah, just thanks for the opportunity. Thanks for everything, man. I appreciate you, Ben, your legend. I'll include links for where to follow, criminally under followed internet, Ben on X on his YouTube show podcast and 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. And Vin, I will beg you to come back on the show a lot of time and I hope you come back on again. For sure, man. Thank you.