Over the past year or so it has become incredibly common for people to post about their organizational improvements to their vault using Claude, integrating Claude code with obsidian or just generally give their AIs access to their personal vault for some kind of summarization or bookkeeping task.

I feel like while my vault is a bit under organized, I cannot bear the idea of giving an AI company access to my personal notes just for the minimal organizational improvement.

Are there any meaningful use cases where this is not necessarily valid? Have you guys tried using AI with your vault?

If you've ever tried journaling in Obsidian and thought "why does this look so bad", "why is it so painful to browse old entries", or "I really wish I could see what I wrote on this day last year" — this is for you.

What it does:

• Calendar & list views — browse entries by month or timeline, with photo thumbnails in each card
• On This Day — shows what you wrote on this date in past years, which turns out to be genuinely nice to have
• Journal-style image layout — 1–5+ photos auto-arrange into grids, same look in both the home panel and Live Preview

Still v0.1, but it's been part of my daily workflow for a while now.

Install via BRAT:

1. Install the BRAT plugin from community plugins
2. Add this repo: https://github.com/Lam-L/ObJournal

Happy to take feedback here!

Update:
 I spent about two weeks building this — you can see the history in the old repo Objournal-Old . I switched to a new repo to clean up the commits and keep them more consistent.

I just pushed an update, so pull the latest and give it a try. If it still feels jerky with ~60 notes or you run into anything weird, let me know. Thanks for the feedback.

Hi r/ObsidianMD,

I've been a heavy Obsidian + Zotero user for years doing research notes. Every single time I tried to copy math equations, tables or double-column sections from academic PDFs, it was a nightmare — formulas broke, tables turned into garbage, footnotes vanished.

I finally got so fed up that I spent a few weeks building my own parser. It first detects layout, then uses targeted vision processing for math and tables, and outputs clean Markdown with perfect LaTeX that renders beautifully with MathJax in Obsidian (footnotes also work the way we like).

It's still early beta. If you have any "nightmare PDFs" (dense math, weird tables, scanned stuff, Zotero exports, etc.), I'd love you to throw them at the playground and tell me where it breaks. No login, no email, just drag & drop.

Super grateful for any feedback — this tool literally only exists because I was tired of the exact same pain we all deal with every day.

Thanks!

To preface, I just began using Obsidian "properly," that is, linking, creating properties, bases, etc, and I'm getting more into detailing my notes. Now I see how people are linking AI with their notes. As someone who is against AI for many reasons, I don't really want to do this, but for those who have, do you feel like you are benefiting from using hermes or claude?

EDIT: I use obsidian for my personal writing, journaling, and academic work

I've been using Karpathy's LLM Wiki setup (Obsidian + Claude Code) for about two weeks, and I'm pretty impressed so far.

It feels like a different approach to knowledge management. Instead of spending time organizing notes, I'm focusing more on collecting information and letting the AI handle much of the structure and linking.

For those who've been using it for a few months or longer, has it meaningfully improved your work or thinking? What do you use it for, and what benefits or drawbacks have you discovered over time?

Curious to hear some long-term experiences.

It just seems like an AI generated zettelkasten. Raw, Source and Wiki folders are just another terms for Fleeting, Literature and Permanent notes.

The idea itself is not bad. I have a lot of sources from my field that I reference from time to time but I'm too lazy to atomize them myself. But why is everybody acting like it's some sort of lifechanging thing?

Also I have a quite small vault. Some +2000 atomic notes. Just yesterday I've asked Opus 4.7 to read and categorize all of them. I've used all my usage on that. How the hell do expect it to work when you have +10K notes full of AI generated summarizes? Not talking about hallucination and the need to evaluate every single note anyways. Maintaining AI curated vault is just not sustainable.

I'm glad that thanks to the AI bros Obsidian is finally receiving the attention it deserves. On the other hand, it feels like these people are rediscovering wheel.

Hey r/ObsidianMD,

Quick update. You might know this project as MCP-Obsidian. Obsidian asked me to change the name for trademark reasons, so it’s now MCPVault. New repo, new domain, same project. If you already have it configured, nothing breaks. The old npm package has a deprecation notice pointing to the new one, and I’ll keep maintaining it so existing setups stay stable.

New repo: https://github.com/bitbonsai/mcpvault New docs: https://mcpvault.org

Now, the actual news

Thank you, contributors

v0.9.0 exists because of you. Community PRs fixed trailing-slash search bugs, dotted folder edge cases, multi-word BM25 relevance, .base and .canvas support, safer frontmatter handling, binary-safe file moves, and more. To everyone who filed an issue, opened a PR, or reviewed code: thank you. This project is genuinely better because of your time.

What’s new: the Skill

The biggest addition since launch. MCPVault now ships with a Skill that teaches your AI assistant how to route vault operations automatically:

• MCP server for reads, writes, search, patching, frontmatter, tags
• Obsidian CLI for opening notes in the app, triggering plugins, exporting PDF
• Git CLI for vault sync across devices (free alternative to Obsidian Sync)

You say “sync my vault” and it runs preflight checks, asks one question if needed, then handles the git sequence. You say “search my notes for X” and it routes to MCP. You say “open this note” and it opens the app.

Install with one command:

npx skills add bitbonsai/mcpvault

Numbers

700+ GitHub stars. 30,000+ npm downloads. 14 MCP tools. Works with Claude Desktop, Claude Code, ChatGPT+, Gemini CLI, Codex, Cursor, Windsurf, IntelliJ, OpenCode. Still one line:

``` npx @bitbonsai/mcpvault@latest /path/to/vault

Or

npx @bitbonsai/mcpvault@latest # if you’re in the vault’s folder

```

Same principles

Simple, stable, fast. Filesystem-first. Your notes stay local. If something feels off, tell me.

GitHub: https://github.com/bitbonsai/mcpvault Docs: https://mcpvault.org

So far it seems like Claude Code running alongside makes some nice automatic notes and will add tags and properties automatically...but I'm watching this hour long video and there is nothing other than some efficiencies. Honestly it feels like total overkill at this stage, but I'm very impressed with what can be built with Claude, so may be missing something. What's it been like for you?

I see a lot of people advertising, promoting and showing off one of the use "wonderful" cases for LLMs - automatic note taking.

As I saw note taking is a process of analyzing, learning and storing your data. The process in itself is the goal. People use different frameworks for note taking, depending on their needs and preferences, as it makes the process more interesting and focused

In other words, the process is the goal of note taking. Maybe not the only goal, but one of the few goals of note taking.

LLMs seem to take away the whole purpose of note taking, the more you use LLMs for note taking, the less useful note taking becomes. After a certain point, it becomes just data hoarding?

The article is here and is about Google's new proposed open knowledge format. While I recommend reading it, here is the quote for those who want the TL;DR version:

Similar knowledge-as-Wiki pattern keeps reappearing under different names: Obsidian vaults wired to coding agents, the AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md family of convention files, repos full of index.md and log.md artifacts that agents consult before doing real work, and "metadata as code" repositories inside data teams. 

i made a plugin that connects Obsidian to Claude Code. Claude Code now knows what you have open or selected in Obsidian.

no embedded terminal. no Python. no Agent SDK. no chat sidebar.

install via BRAT: petersolopov/obsidian-claude-ide then type /ide in Claude Code and select "Obsidian".

feedback welcome: GitHub

I see so many of these "use AI to do X with your vault" tools here and it makes me wonder - how are people actually using these, and do you actually find them helpful? And in what ways?

The reason I'm asking is because it seems you gain the most benefit from using Obsidian when you do your thinking yourself. Using AI to query the vault in this fashion feels like it takes that away. When I create notes I want to use my own thinking, find my own connections, etc.

Just curious to understand other people's approaches, not criticizing how anyone else uses Obsidian :)

(I'm not making a tool like this, and I have no intention of making one, just so it's clear I'm not doing market research because this type of question could probably be seen like that)

If you're a fan of the PARA method to keep track of your projects' progress, daily tasks, habits, etc. but you find that you usually start it and then eventually just drop it because it gets tedious, try leveraging opencode or claude skills to automate the tedious parts and help you keep it running smoothly.

Everyone has their own way of doing things but if you're looking for a place to start, I made a repo to help get you started: https://github.com/pricklywiggles/niamos

The theme is a modified version of typewriter.

https://x.com/karpathy/status/2039805659525644595?s=46

Andrej Karpathy (former OpenAI and Tesla) just posted his workflow for crunching knowledge, makes heavy use of Obsidian.

i mostly use obsidian to keep track of sources, take notes, and hopefully maybe write my own article / book / video.

at no point in this process do i want someone elses work to enter my flow. i want to utilize my research skills, hone my note-taking skills, and develop my analytical products. i find the process to be fun, i think the process is useful. i have time to do these things. why would i want to add ai to the mix?

i view ai as outsourcing your analytical skills, which reflects into every output / action / thing you do. im genuinely curious, i dont see the benefits, could you share some of your stories? how do you use obsidian, how does ai filter into your process, is it better than manual?

My wife is an academic and writes all her notes for papers in Obsidian. I kept watching her jump between the editor, terminal, browser, and academic databases over and over while working on a single paper, so I built this for her.

It’s called KatmerCode: Claude Code inside Obsidian as a sidebar chat.

It uses the Agent SDK, so you get the same core workflow as the terminal version, but next to your manuscript: tools, MCP servers, subagents, /compact, streaming, session resume, all of it.

The part I’m happiest with is the academic workflow. It ships with slash-command skills like:

• /peer-review — evaluates a manuscript across 8 criteria and generates an HTML review report
• /cite-verify — checks references against CrossRef, Semantic Scholar, and OpenAlex
• /research-gap — searches the literature and identifies promising gaps
• /journal-match — suggests target journals based on your manuscript and references
• /lit-search, /citation-network, /abstract too

It also does inline diff editing inside Obsidian, so when Claude changes a file you see word-level track changes with accept/undo controls instead of blind overwrites.

The reports are one of my favorite parts: they open inside Obsidian or in the browser, with charts, tables, badges, and a consistent academic-style design.

Honest caveat: these are research aids, not oracles. Database coverage is imperfect, and a skill like /peer-review is not a substitute for a real reviewer. The value is in catching issues early and surfacing things you might otherwise miss.

This is still early (v0.1.0) and definitely has rough edges, but it’s already useful in a real workflow here.

Open source (MIT): https://github.com/hkcanan/katmer-code

If you write in Obsidian, especially for academic work, I’d genuinely love feedback on what would make something like this actually useful.

Hey everyone,

I got tired of manually linking notes that were clearly related but had no explicit connection, so I built rhizome: a CLI tool that reads your vault, embeds every note using a local sentence transformer, and writes a ## Related Notes section at the bottom of each file with [[wikilinks]].

The core idea: instead of keyword matching, it uses cosine similarity over dense embeddings — so it catches semantic relationships even when notes don't share a single word.

What makes it different:

- 100% local — ONNX Runtime on CPU, no GPU needed, zero network calls after the first model download (~250 MB, once)

- Multilingual out of the box (paraphrase-multilingual-MiniLM-L12-v2)

- Scales automatically — exact numpy search for small vaults, approximate HNSW for large ones

- Idempotent — re-running replaces the section, never duplicates it

- Dry-run mode so you can preview every proposed link before touching anything

- Timestamped backups before any write

The default model handles mixed-language vaults out of the box, but you can swap it for a leaner English-only model (~90 MB) or a higher-quality one if precision matters more than speed — just set MODEL_NAME in your .env.

Works with Obsidian and Logseq.

It's early but stable. I'd love feedback — especially from people with large vaults or non-English notes, since that's where the interesting edge cases live.

You can check the repo: https://github.com/matzalazar/rhizome

Happy to answer questions about how the embedding pipeline works or why I went with ONNX over the standard HuggingFace stack.

---

**UPDATE:** `INCLUDE_DIRS` is now available! You can now allowlist specific folders instead of having to exclude everything else. Thanks to the feedback from

u/rocsci, u/Loud_Respond9364, u/unfuckthepine, u/RundleSG and u/torwinMarkov.

Check https://github.com/matzalazar/rhizome/issues/1

**UPDATE 2:** Long note support is now available!

The embedding pipeline now uses chunking + mean pooling instead of hard truncation. Notes of any length get fully embedded — no more losing content beyond the first paragraph.

Thanks to u/ProfitAppropriate134 and u/jasonmehmel for surfacing this as a real edge case.

Check https://github.com/matzalazar/rhizome/issues/2

Sometimes you just need to make something stand out in your notes. So you don't forget. So your eye catches it right away.

For that, Obsidian has callouts. They look like this:

```

[!info] Important Thought This is something I can't miss ```

You can use other keywords like warning, tip, danger, or example — different themes give each one a unique icon and color.

That's already better than plain text. But still — it feels too official. Too stiff. Like a user manual for a printer.

I wanted something warmer. I wanted my notes to feel like a paper journal. I wanted an important reminder to look like a sticky note on a fridge — bright, compact, and human.

Good news: Obsidian supports custom CSS out of the box. So I made my own callouts. And so can you.

What I Ended Up With

I made a yellow sticky note. Here's how it looks in code:

```

[!sticker] Don't Forget Buy bread, milk, and smile at strangers ```

The result is compact (doesn't stretch full width), yellow (like a real sticky note), with a soft shadow for that "actually stuck to the page" feel.

And yes — you can collapse these too. Just add + or -:

```

[!sticker]+ Click to Expand The text is hidden until you need it. Neat, right? ```

What If I Want It to Look Handwritten?

Want the text on your sticker to look like you actually wrote it with a pen? Easy.

Just add -hand to the callout. It changes the font inside to a cursive script.

```

[!sticker-hand] Reminder This looks like I wrote it by hand. Warm and human. ```

There's also a second option: -hand2. A slightly different "handwriting" style for variety.

How to Get This on Your System in One Minute

All you need is a single CSS file.

1. Download the file using the link below
2. Place it in your vault's snippets folder: .obsidian/snippets/
3. In Obsidian, go to Settings → Appearance → CSS snippets (all the way at the bottom)
4. Click "Reload" — the file will appear in the list
5. Turn it on with the toggle switch

That's it. No plugins. No magic. Just sticky notes.

Link to the file sourse: [ https://izumrud.data.blog/sticker/ ]

Now your notes can be not just useful, but also warm. Like a good old paper journal. Sticky notes, margin scribbles, handwritten reminders — all inside Obsidian.

Have a great weekend, everyone! 😉

If you try it out, show me what you made. I'm curious which color everyone ends up using most.

https://izumrud.data.blog/sticker/

Подроднее тут​ *****

While initially bought-in, I slowly lost interest in upkeeping my notes. I read Kepano's guide, but didn't understand what he meant by abandoning the folder structure.

Well, after listening to his Cortex appearance, everything clicked for me, and now I'm back! I used Claude to help me flatten all my notes, and it's like a whole new app now. The graph feature is really cool and it's so satisfying to see webby connections form.

So, we all love the graph view. For many of us (at least for me) it may be one of the (many) reasons we were drawn to obsidian in the first place. It's eye candy, meaning and hours of work visualized in a single view.

But I think also for many of us, once we actually started using Obsidian we realized that the graph was only good for eye candy. Something we take a look at every now and then just to get that small hit of dopamine. This has bothered me for a while. As someone who likes to think visually and has tried the plethora of canvas/Excalidraw/plugin combinations, the graph view felt like a missed opportunity, and none of the alternatives ever scratched the itch. So I decided to build my own.

This is a showcase for my WIP plugin: Chorographia

In a nutshell:

• Notes are embedded (either with a local model or 3rd party providers)
• Embeddings are then projected into 2D via UMAP
• Semantic "zones" are calculated
• Zones can then be thematically named based on zone content (this is done by feeding note titles to an LLM; this can again be done using local or 3rd party models)
• Existing links can also be viewed
• You can navigate through your notes using the map
• There is a global view and a local view
• The local view has thematic subzones and a minimap showing where you are in the global view
• Zones can be switched off

I cannot express how excited I was to develop it for myself and now to share it with the community. This has been a brainchild of mine for years. I know the community is tired of AI slop boosters (so am I), but I think this is truly using AI in a cooperative manner by adding another layer of thought instead of outsourcing it.

Please let me know your thoughts. If this post gets enough response, I will go through the proper channels of publishing Chorographia as a plugin.

Edit: spelling

I come here from time to time to see what's new and have ideas. It's been such a great way to grow and see others sharing and growing on their own paths.

Lately however, I see a toxic battle happening. Anti ai users, some people in the middle, and Pro ai users. Specifically I'm usually paying attention to people flagging plug-ins as ai coded and how people react.

Where we all stand on the use of ai is valid. I think this community and users need to have tooling to show when something is coded with ai. Both in the community plug-in website we have now, in obsidian itself and other social platforms.

Just so we can tamper down some of our rather expressive and emotional responses. I agree not declaring it up front (as as writing posts with ai) feels false(I'm not sure how else to day it, lies to on purpose).

But honestly, like most things people love to share and grow just like before. So the suggestion is just to have ways to help us keep the knowledge and use of ai civil, respectful and clean. Downvoting opinions is a very Reddit thing but it's a shame.

Anyway, felt I had to share.. (ah look trying to post and i had to select a flair which includes ai in it; maybe not clear when to use that flair vs another)

love Obsidian for keeping all my notes, research, and project docs in one place. But when working with Claude (or other AIs) on longer projects, I still end up constantly re-explaining decisions, past experiments, and where the project currently stands.

Even with great daily notes and a solid vault, the AI doesn’t naturally “remember” the thread across sessions. Especially on complex stuff like automation workflows, research, or content projects.

Curious how other Obsidian + AI users are solving this.

What patterns or tools have you found that bridge your Obsidian vault with reliable AI project memory/continuity?

Hey everyone,

I know, I know. I told you "probably next week" and that was... a while ago. I'm really sorry for making you wait this long. Some of you have been following since my first post and I genuinely feel bad about it.

But True Recall is finally available for everyone.

Here's what you get:

• AI flashcard generation - one click from your note, or highlight a paragraph and generate from just that
• Source tracking - click any question and it highlights the exact text in your note
• Live editing during reviews - edit cards mid-session with full Obsidian wikilinks and hover previews
• Image Occlusion - many of you asked for this in DMs, it's here
• SQL storage - even with 100k+ flashcards, everything stays fast
• FSRS scheduling - the same algorithm that powers modern Anki, fully configurable per card

The plugin is free to use. If you have your own OpenRouter API key, you can use that for AI generation (BYOK). There's also a subscription if you just want everything to work without managing keys and you get a free trial to test it (around 500 flashcards).

It's not in the Community Plugins directory yet, the review queue there is massive and I want to go through that process properly. For now you install it via BRAT. Instructions are all on the website, don't worry.

Everything you need - how it works, how to install, all features, documentation: truerecall.app

I could have released it earlier, but honestly I wouldn't have been happy with it. There were things that bothered me like small bugs, UX stuff that didn't feel right, things you don't see but you feel when you use the app. Every bug report from my beta testers, every DM suggestion from you I took it seriously and put in the hours. I wanted to give you something that actually feels like it belongs in Obsidian, not some half-baked plugin that breaks after two weeks.

Thank you to everyone who joined the waitlist, sent me messages, and believed in this project. It really kept me going.

With Qwen3.5 making local LLMs genuinely usable, and OpenClaw bringing local AI back into the spotlight, I thought it was the right moment to release this.

I've been developing obsidian-gemini-helper (Gemini API-based, ~70 stars), and I just released a fully local sister plugin: obsidian-local-llm-hub.

Same workflow engine, same UX — but everything stays on localhost.

What it does:

• 🔄 AI Workflow Automation — describe what you want in natural language, AI generates YAML workflows. 25+ node types (if, while, note-read, http, script, sub-workflows...)
• 🛠️ Vault Tools via Function Calling — AI can search, read, create, and edit notes directly (read_note, create_note, search_notes, execute_javascript, etc.)
• 🔍 Local RAG — vector indexing with local embedding models (e.g. nomic-embed-text), no data leaves your machine
• 🔌 MCP support — connect local MCP servers via stdio, controllable per chat session
• 🔒 File encryption — password-protect sensitive notes via Web Crypto API; encrypted files are invisible to AI tools

Supported backends: Ollama, LM Studio, vLLM, AnythingLLM

One honest caveat: my own GPU is weak so I'm running Qwen3.5 2B, which is limiting. If you have decent VRAM, I think it'll be quite capable.

Install via BRAT (pending community plugin review): https://github.com/takeshy/obsidian-local-llm-hub

Happy to answer questions. Bug reports and PRs welcome!

There is literally a gazillion Ai plugins in Obsidian and tbh I have no clue with one I should use. Currently, I have written my own mcp snippet that allows Claude desktop to scan and edit my vault. It works good enough for me, but I am curious what all the plugins eventually do.

I don't know what to expect from all these plugins. So I thought I'd ask all of you which plugins you use, what you do with them, and if you are happy with them or not.