Sitemap

Member-only story

Turning My Obsidian Vault into a Second Brain for Claude

8 min readJun 12, 2026

--

Press enter or click to view image in full size
Representation of Obsidian being loaded into Claude via MCP

For a the past 6 months, Obsidian has been the place where everything I write ends up. My blog posts, my talk proposals, articles I want to come back to, and the daily scraps of ideas that do not yet belong anywhere. It is the closest thing I have to a second brain, which raised an obvious question earlier this year: if all of this knowledge lives in one place, could Claude read it too?

It turns out the answer is yes, and the setup was simpler than I expected. In this blog post I will cover:

  • How my vault is organised, and why the structure matters
  • How I connected the vault to Claude using MCP
  • The CLAUDE.md file that teaches Claude how to behave in my vault
  • What this setup actually enables day to day

How my vault is organised

Before talking about the AI side of things, it is worth explaining the structure of the vault itself, because the structure is what makes the integration useful.

My vault is deliberately flat, with a small number of folders that each have a clear job:

  • _Inbox/ is the landing zone. Each day I capture into a dated note, created from a template with just two headings: "Interesting Articles" and "Agent Log". I…

--

--

Jonathan Fielding
Jonathan Fielding

Written by Jonathan Fielding

Principal Engineer working for @Legend, speaker about web things, writing about tech, contributor to open source. If you like what I write make sure to follow.