Second Brain on Obsidian WITHOUT a Subscription!

So, you want a second brain but without a fancy subscription? No problem! We all want to go a bit cheap.

Enter: Obsidian. My favorite note taking app. Simply... brilliant. The graph view is addicting.

Make sure Obsidian is installed on your computer.

APPROACH ONE

ANTIGRAVITY

First, you need Antigravity. This one is a fancy new IDE, but this one gives you Claude Opus 4.6 WITHOUT a subscription!

NOTE: This is made on Obsidian WITHOUT using ANY plugins!

Now how to begin making your second brain:

1. Create a new vault on Obsidian.
2. Create a new .md file (or click on the new note on the app)
3. Write down all you need Claude to know. Your projects, skills, ideas, etc.
4. Open Antigravity, create a new Workspace and point it towards your Obsidian Vault.
5. Choose Claude Opus 4.6 (Thinking) from the Agent Manager menu.
6. Ask Claude to analyse your .md file and then on basis of that, ask it to do whatever. For example:

"Create a multiple .md notes for Obsidian with linking for one specific focus point and link all other skills, projects, ideas, etc. to that one. Improvise on certain aspects and keep words to a minimum in each .md file."

The limitations of this are that you have massive rate limits on your free plan, which means you will run out of credits and usage. However, it's not necessary you do this with Claude. You could pick GPT-OSS, or any of the Gemini models.

HOWEVER, if you are too picky about this...

APPROACH TWO

TERMINAL BASED LOCAL AGENT

This approach REQUIRES a beefy computer that can run heavyweight models (or lighter models, but they do cut down on accuracy significantly)

Make sure you have your model of choice and Ollama up to date.

1. Configure your Local Model

ollama pull qwen3.6-coder:32b

1. Install & Connect Cline

2. Open VS Code.

3. Go to the Extensions Marketplace (Ctrl+Shift+X or Cmd+Shift+X) and search for Cline. Install it.

4. Open the Cline panel on your sidebar and click the Settings icon (gear).

   1. Configure the provider settings:

      API Provider: Select Ollama

      Base URL: http://localhost:11434

      Model ID: Select qwen3.6-coder:32b (or your preferred local model)

Now, create a new Obsidian Vault and point VS Code towards it. Use Cline to ask the model to analyse your .md file filled with projects, ideas, etc. Ask it to create more .md files in a similar manner you would ask Claude to do so.

For this, qwen isn't suggested, but you should use GPT OSS or Gemma 4 (or above) in this case. They will make your second brain come out wonderfully.

Cover image credits to: Victor Hugo Germano.