Giving Claude a brain

#claude #obsidian #productivity #opensource

I use Claude across a bunch of projects. Every one of them needs some place for Claude to write down stuff that isn't in the code. A decision I made three weeks ago, why a bug actually happened, a workflow nobody ever wrote down. I kept solving that by hand, per project, and after a while none of my setups looked the same and I trusted none of them fully.

So I built claude-obsidian-vault-kit. It's not a plugin, it's basically a setup contract disguised as a Markdown file. You hand it to Claude, answer a few questions, and it builds you a proper Obsidian vault: folders, an index, and some tools that check everything stays sane.

How it works

Download claude-obsidian-vault-kit.md, one file, that's it.
Drop it into a Claude conversation.
Say "set this up for me."

Claude then just asks you stuff first, like whether you already use Obsidian, if you want a throwaway test vault to poke around in before it's real, which projects you have, how you want to back things up. Only after that does it actually write anything to your disk.

What you end up with is completely empty. No fake example notes, nothing invented, just the folder structure, three small tools, and a few pages explaining how it all works.

The part I actually built this for

Every note gets a small header at the top (title, summary, project, topic, date) and the tool that builds your index only reads that header. It never opens the note itself. That's all: your index can't get cluttered with random text because there's no code path that lets it happen. You never edit the index by hand either, you edit the note and rerun the tool, and if a note's header is broken or missing, it doesn't just get quietly skipped. It tells you, loudly.

There's also a /vaultkit command that gets installed for you and running it rebuilds the index and checks for broken links, duplicate notes, and stale scheduled stuff. All in one go.

Where it stands right now

I've tested pretty thoroughly on Windows with PowerShell and Git Bash. macOS hasn't been tried ones (I don't a Macbook), and Linux was only tested once on an older version of the kit, so treat both as "probably fine, not promised." If you try either, opening an issue with what happened would genuinely help.