One evening of setup. A vault that files itself at 7 a.m., and a model that opens every session already knowing your work.
A 30-year-old freelance developer in Lisbon kept his best thinking in 5 places at once. A notes app, 30 browser tabs, a Notion board he stopped opening, and 40 archived Claude chats he would never find again. Every project started the same way: 20 minutes rebuilding context from memory, then losing most of it by Friday.
Then he stopped pasting his life into a chat box and started pointing Claude at a folder. One evening of wiring. By the end of the month he opened his Obsidian graph and froze, because the thing knew connections he had forgotten he made. The same build, step by step, written for someone who has never opened Claude Code or Obsidian.
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## 1. Two tools, two jobs
Obsidian is the storage. A free notes app that keeps everything as plain markdown files on your own machine. Notes link to each other with [[double brackets]], and those links form a graph you can see. Claude is the brain on top. It reads the whole vault, files new material where it belongs, links it to what already exists, and answers across all of it. The whole system is text files, so no single model owns it. Point a different one at the folder next year and it still works.
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## 2. Install Claude Code
Download the Claude desktop app from claude.com/download and open the Code tab. That tab is Claude Code, the version that reads and writes files on your computer. It needs a paid plan. Claude Pro runs $20 a month, or $17 billed annually, and the free tier will not run Claude Code. This is the one cost in the build. Everything below is free.
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## 3. Make your vault
Download Obsidian from obsidian.md. Create a new vault, name it brain, pick a folder to store it. That folder is now your second brain. Make one note, type a sentence, then type [[goals]]. The bracketed word turns into a link. That single mechanic, notes pointing at notes, is the thing Claude will do for you at scale.
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## 4. Open a door into the vault
Claude reaches the vault through a plugin. In Obsidian, open Settings, click Community plugins, turn them on, then Browse and install Local REST API. Enable it, open its settings, and copy the API key. Leave Obsidian running. The door only works while the app is open.
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## 5. Wire Claude in with MCP
In the Code tab, paste this with your key swapped in:
claude mcp add-json obsidian-vault '{ "type": "stdio", "command": "uvx",
"args": ["mcp-obsidian"], "env": { "OBSIDIAN_API_KEY": "PASTE-YOUR-KEY",
"OBSIDIAN_HOST": "127.0.0.1", "OBSIDIAN_PORT": "27124" } }'
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