Transcript
00:00:00Most of you are using Claude code with Obsidian the wrong way.
00:00:04Because if all you're doing is opening Claude in your vault
00:00:06and using Obsidian as a way to read Markdown,
00:00:09you are leaving a ton of value on the table.
00:00:11These tools can do way more than that.
00:00:13And one example is this.
00:00:15I've turned Obsidian into the command center for my entire Claude OS.
00:00:19It has a fully integrated terminal, custom observability,
00:00:22and all of my most used skills and automations are just one click away.
00:00:25So today I'm going to break down how this command center works,
00:00:27how you can build it for yourself, and what's going on under the hood
00:00:31so we can get the most out of Claude code and Obsidian.
00:00:34So this is my Obsidian command center.
00:00:37And I love this thing because it kind of gives me the best of both worlds.
00:00:40I have the integrated terminal here, so I'm able to use Claude code
00:00:42the same way I always use it, which is in the terminal.
00:00:45But at the same time, I get all of the benefits of the Obsidian ecosystem.
00:00:49I have my entire vault set up over here on the left
00:00:52so I can very easily see all my Markdown files.
00:00:54And right here, I have what is essentially a custom plug-in
00:00:58that Claude code built for Obsidian.
00:01:02And it's completely custom.
00:01:03Everything I see here is related to me and what I need to see in my day-to-day.
00:01:06Obviously, my stuff is very content-forward.
00:01:08So that includes stuff like, hey, what are my subscriptions doing?
00:01:12What are my follower counts doing across all my platforms?
00:01:15What's going on in my schedule that day?
00:01:17What are my daily tasks?
00:01:18And this is just sort of like the overview.
00:01:20So I can go deeper.
00:01:21I can see, okay, let's do a deeper dive into my audience.
00:01:24How has my YouTube been doing?
00:01:26What's been working?
00:01:26What hasn't been working?
00:01:28If I look at research, I can see stuff like all of the trending GitHub's
00:01:32that have been created in the last week.
00:01:34I can see Hacker News.
00:01:35I can see also sort of a pulse of the AI landscape at large.
00:01:40Headlines, X conversation, YouTube trending, and then content opportunities.
00:01:45The cool thing with this isn't necessarily what I have here, but the fact that you could
00:01:49change any of this or add anything you want to with a single prompt inside of Cloud Code.
00:01:55On top of that, I have a lot of more common automations and skills I run on a daily basis.
00:01:59Things like deep research, doing an inbox brief, a morning report.
00:02:02A lot of these automations and their outputs are actually tied to what you see here visually.
00:02:08So something like the research side is tied to an actual skill.
00:02:13So if I click this and look at the full GitHub trending, I can see the full list of all 10
00:02:18trending GitHub repos that have been created in the last seven days that are related to AI
00:02:21as well as the top five trending.
00:02:24And because it's Obsidian, it's really easy for me to just click inside here.
00:02:27And I also have a web viewer.
00:02:29So it also has a browser, which is nice.
00:02:31All in the same pane.
00:02:32Also, I have my actual calendar over here on the right.
00:02:35And this just isn't like a special plugin with Obsidian.
00:02:37This is literally just a pinned browser tab, which works for me.
00:02:42And so when you look at this all together, what I'm able to do is I'm able to do all my work
00:02:45I would normally do inside of Cloud Code in the terminal.
00:02:48Yet I get all this additional sort of observability, sort of like visual reports that you naturally
00:02:53don't get inside of the terminal.
00:02:55Because don't get me wrong.
00:02:55I love the terminal, but it has some weaknesses, which is why everyone uses IDEs like VS Code
00:03:00and that sort of thing.
00:03:01But over time, as I've moved away from things like VS Code, I still like to have stuff like
00:03:06this up kind of at eye level.
00:03:08So I have found a command center pretty much like this inside of Obsidian is a great way
00:03:12for me to do my work.
00:03:14And because it's completely custom, knowing how to create something like this, I think
00:03:18is a huge value add, especially if you're someone who's more of a solo operator.
00:03:22Plus, if you build something like this, naturally, you're going to have a more symbiotic
00:03:26relationship between Cloud Code and Obsidian, which means we're using Cloud Code in a manner
00:03:32where we have some sort of memory construct that allows us to get better outputs over
00:03:36time.
00:03:37So let's talk about the process and what you need to be thinking about if you were to create
00:03:40something like this for yourself.
00:03:42But first, a quick word from today's sponsor, me.
00:03:47So last month, I released my Cloud Code Masterclass, and it is the number one way to go from zero
00:03:51to AI dev, especially if you don't come from a technical background.
00:03:55My Cloud Code Masterclass also includes an agentic OS and a codex masterclass as well.
00:04:01So whether you're trying to master Cloud Code or codex, or you're trying to build something
00:04:06exactly like we're talking about today, you can find it inside of Chase AI+.
00:04:11It includes all the prompts to pretty much get my exact setup, including this command center.
00:04:16So if you want to get your hands on that, there'll be linked to that in the pinned comment.
00:04:19So what do we need to do if we want to build an obsidian command center that sort of sits
00:04:23on top of Cloud Code?
00:04:25Well, there's two things we need to be thinking about.
00:04:27One is sort of the fancy part, the observability piece.
00:04:30What do you actually want this to show?
00:04:33So for me, like you saw, I broke it out into three areas.
00:04:35I have the overview, which is where I normally sit.
00:04:37I can see my five-hour token burn.
00:04:39I can see what's going on in my sub count.
00:04:41I can see my latest upload, right?
00:04:43My schedule, my daily tasks, all that.
00:04:46Well, what do you need?
00:04:47What do you want to actually see?
00:04:49And again, mine goes deeper for audience and research.
00:04:52I've seen people do this a number of different ways.
00:04:54I have certain people I've talked to who have, you know, they're running multiple businesses.
00:04:59So each tab inside their OS relates to a different business or even like a different persona,
00:05:04right?
00:05:04Sometimes they have their business owner hat on.
00:05:06Sometimes they have their dev hat on, et cetera, et cetera.
00:05:09So that's a question that I can't give you the answer to, but you need to know what it
00:05:15is you're actually trying to track.
00:05:16What metrics do you care about?
00:05:18What do you want to see when you're also coding or using cloud code?
00:05:21That should drive your answer.
00:05:24Ideally, that answer is also tied to stuff you already do.
00:05:26So like you saw here on the research side of stuff, when it looks at GitHub trending,
00:05:30hacker news, and my morning brief, like this morning brief, this report right here is
00:05:35something I already do regularly.
00:05:37Like it's an actual skill.
00:05:39It's kind of giving me a summary of a deeper report, which is tied to a skill.
00:05:44So hopefully by now, if you've been using cloud code a lot in your business or in your
00:05:48daily life, you've kind of set a series of like workflows and skills and automations.
00:05:52Well, instead of having these just like hidden away in some markdown file that you occasionally
00:05:57use Obsidian to bring up, well, let's just put it in one place.
00:06:00Let's make it really easy for you to see.
00:06:02So there are 1 trillion different iterations of what that could be.
00:06:05All you have to do at that point is pretty much have a back and forth with cloud code.
00:06:09And try to come up with some ideas and you don't have to come up with a single one.
00:06:13You just like kind of need to experiment because it's not too hard to swap them out.
00:06:17And when it comes to the actual design, the sort of aesthetic you're going for, I think
00:06:21a great trick is using cloud design to help you out.
00:06:24So have cloud design create a prototype as if it was creating a web app because it's going
00:06:28to create a plugin.
00:06:29This whole command center, this is a plugin.
00:06:32It's code that cloud code wrote.
00:06:34So go to cloud design, have it create some sort of project.
00:06:37But when you create it, have it create like a bunch of different variations.
00:06:41So I already knew I kind of wanted this like black and orange type of style.
00:06:47But what you can do instead of just showing up with one single style, have it create like
00:06:50three, four, five different sort of macro variants with completely different styles.
00:06:55And eventually you can hopefully nail something that you like.
00:06:59That's my sort of tip for trying to nail some sort of visual style.
00:07:03Now, the second thing you want to think about for your dashboard is do you want to set up
00:07:06some sort of shortcuts for your skills and automations that you use very regularly?
00:07:11So that's what you see right here.
00:07:13These are kind of the most common skills and automations.
00:07:16And if they're automations, it allows me to do it on demand that I use in my day to day.
00:07:20So for my plan today's skill, it will go out into my calendar, grab everything.
00:07:24It also takes a look at my email and gives me sort of my daily tasks.
00:07:28My YT pipeline allows me to like actually search for specific things on YouTube.
00:07:33I have a weekly review, a morning brief, et cetera, et cetera.
00:07:35Again, totally custom.
00:07:36But I found it to be super convenient having these to be simple buttons that often generate
00:07:40some sort of report instead of having to do it manually inside of Claude or open up another
00:07:44terminal and have it run it that way.
00:07:46Because what this does is it just opens up a headless version of Claude.
00:07:51And don't worry, we'll talk about Claude-P at the end here.
00:07:54In terms of some of the recent anthropic changes, but it opens up a headless version of Claude
00:07:58and then runs it for me.
00:07:59So it doesn't like sort of have to populate whatever current active session I'm using.
00:08:04And that's kind of the meat and potatoes of the command center itself.
00:08:09Like you say, it's completely customizable.
00:08:10It just depends on what you want to see.
00:08:12Beyond that, and remember, this is what Claude code is going to create via a plugin.
00:08:17Beyond that, then we're talking about actual Obsidian plugins and things in the Obsidian ecosystem
00:08:22itself.
00:08:23So there's a couple of free wins.
00:08:25So if we go down to like settings and go to community plugins, there's a few you're probably
00:08:31going to want to add.
00:08:32So first of all, you definitely want to add terminal.
00:08:35You are going to want to, you can see here the command center, you can see how this has been
00:08:39added as a specific plugin.
00:08:41And that's the one Claude code that you're going to want to want to add hot reload.
00:08:45So hot reload means if you make a change and have Claude code make a change, you don't have
00:08:48to restart Obsidian every single time.
00:08:51The iconized, that's what allows me to have these little like icons next to all my folders.
00:08:57Another one you're going to want to do if you go to core plugins is you definitely want to
00:09:00make sure you have web viewer actually enabled.
00:09:03For whatever reason, it's not by default available.
00:09:06So web viewer just means I can actually look at things like I click this link to a video.
00:09:12It actually takes me there versus pulling up, you know, my actual Chrome browser in another
00:09:17window.
00:09:18And also remember, you can adjust all this however you want.
00:09:20So like if I want to have some sort of, you know, tab up here, I can do that and on and on and on.
00:09:25That's the nice thing about Obsidian.
00:09:27It's just like there's so many different variations of this you can create.
00:09:30Now, the other thing you have to nail if you decide to go with some sort of like Obsidian
00:09:33command center route is like, okay, what's actually going on in terms of the file structure
00:09:38of Obsidian and Claude code?
00:09:40Because if you want to use Claude code with Obsidian and you plan on having any level of scale,
00:09:46like thousands and thousands of documents, you have to have some sort of file structure
00:09:49that makes sense.
00:09:51Now, a very common structure you'll see is the Carpathi file structure.
00:09:55Now, the Carpathi file structure looks something like this, where we have our vault.
00:09:59And then within the vault, we have three subfolders, the raw, the wiki, and the outputs.
00:10:05So raw is where unstructured data goes.
00:10:08Wiki is kind of just like internal reports or internal Wikipedia pages that actually break
00:10:14out what we've done in the unstructured data.
00:10:16And then third, we have some sort of output, some sort of deliverable.
00:10:18So example would be, hey, I want you to do some research on AI agents.
00:10:22All that research goes down here into the raw.
00:10:25Hey, we take that information about AI agents and we turn it into an article inside of our
00:10:29wiki.
00:10:30And then lastly, hey, I now want to create a slide deck to show someone information about
00:10:35AI agents.
00:10:36Well, that goes into the output section.
00:10:38And at each level of obsidian, every single layer deep, we add some sort of index file that tells
00:10:45Claude code, hey, at this layer of the folder, this is what exists.
00:10:50So for example, if I told Claude code, hey, can you look at stuff that we've created that
00:10:55that has to do with AI agents, it would start at the vault, it would go to the wiki, it would
00:11:00read the master index, which says, hey, inside of here, there's AI agents, rag systems and
00:11:05content creation.
00:11:06It would then go to AI agents.
00:11:08And then inside of AI agents, it also had what would have an index file, a table of content
00:11:12saying, hey, here's all the files inside of here.
00:11:14Now, obviously, that's overkill if we're talking about just three different things, but think
00:11:18of it being 3000.
00:11:21But the truth is, when it comes to creating a command center with obsidian and actually
00:11:24having some sort of like symbiosis between Claude code and obsidian, you don't have to
00:11:28do this.
00:11:29It doesn't have to be raw, it doesn't have to be wiki, it doesn't have to be output, you
00:11:32don't have to follow Karpathy's recommended system.
00:11:35You just need something that makes sense for you, and you need something that anyone can kind
00:11:40of travel through if you said, hey, find this document.
00:11:43Because if we think big picture, we have thousands and thousands and thousands of documents, if
00:11:47we don't have a system that makes sense, and there's a clear sort of highway to go down
00:11:51to find things, well, that's going to cause Claude code to eat up a bunch of tokens, and
00:11:56it's going to be slower.
00:11:57And then it's like, okay, why don't we just use a full blown rag system.
00:12:00So you could potentially put yourself in a corner where you need to add a lot of complexity
00:12:04to your system.
00:12:05So for me, I have an archive, content, daily notes, dashboard, inbox ops, projects, raw
00:12:12system in wiki.
00:12:12So if you break all those out, they kind of fall into these three similar buckets.
00:12:19I've just added a few to sort of like delineate some stuff.
00:12:24But at the end of the day, there's still kind of an unstructured area, a structured area, and
00:12:28then output slash deliverables area.
00:12:30But just like everything else we've talked about with the subsidiary setup, it's totally
00:12:34custom.
00:12:34You just need to find out what makes sense to you.
00:12:37If you can explain it, and if someone can understand it, then Claude code probably can too.
00:12:42And speaking of that, the other thing you're going to want to pay attention to is your Claude.md.
00:12:47So what should we put in our Claude.md?
00:12:51I'm of the opinion that less is more.
00:12:53So when it comes to the sort of conventions that go into this folder, I think primarily
00:12:58should have to do with your vault structure.
00:13:00Like this way, Claude code knows exactly where to go to get things.
00:13:04So my vault structure kind of breaks out what is happening at each folder.
00:13:08And then I kind of talk about stuff like the navigation pattern, how it should actually
00:13:11move through each folder to find stuff.
00:13:13And then I have some information about file names and organization, Obsidian Markdown.
00:13:17So I think at the bare minimum, what you need to have inside your Claude.md is some sort
00:13:21of explanation of like your file structure, how it should navigate.
00:13:25And then I would add a little blurb about Obsidian best practices.
00:13:28Basically like how you want it to use Obsidian, which means like have wiki links, how you want
00:13:33it to embed, how you want things to be tagged.
00:13:35That way we can get the most out of Claude code, creating things inside Obsidian in an Obsidian
00:13:42type fashion.
00:13:43And by doing so, you're able to get the most out of these Obsidian type systems without
00:13:47having to manually do anything, right?
00:13:48That's the symbiotic relationship here.
00:13:51Claude code writes the files in Obsidian format because it's an Obsidian.
00:13:54It makes it really easy for you, the human being to actually read all these things, get
00:13:58the most out of it.
00:13:59That's sort of the idea.
00:14:00And you combine that with the observability you get with a command center system and an
00:14:05integrated terminal.
00:14:06And I think you can be sitting really pretty with a Claude OS using this kind of setup.
00:14:11Now, the last thing I want to talk about was sort of cost, especially when we talk about,
00:14:15hey, if I click this button, a scale or automation gets used and it's in a headless format with
00:14:19Claude, so Claude-P.
00:14:21Well, for those of you who haven't been paying attention, that sort of use case for Claude
00:14:26Claude code will no longer pull from your Mac subscription.
00:14:29Instead, what it's going to do is every month they're going to throw you $200 on top of your
00:14:33Mac sub and then headless programmatic use of Claude code will pull from that pool, that
00:14:39$200 pool.
00:14:40Issue with that is it's not using the subsidized sort of usage that you get with a max plan.
00:14:45Instead, it's going to be on API sort of costs, which is like 10x more expensive.
00:14:50So can you run into problems with that?
00:14:53Realistically, I don't think so.
00:14:56You know, in an Obsidian setup like this, I'm using these, you know, throughout the day,
00:15:00but I'm not sitting there spamming these, right?
00:15:03I'm still primarily operating inside of the terminal itself.
00:15:06So while it sucks, I don't think that's really going to be a problem.
00:15:11If it is a problem for you, well, then just move over to the codex, Eli, to be totally honest.
00:15:16Having all this be a layer on top of codex instead of a layer on top of Claude code, like there's
00:15:22no, there's basically no difference.
00:15:24You can refactor this in like five minutes, right?
00:15:27Like we're just changing Claude dash P to codex headless.
00:15:32So, and codex is a really good tool as well.
00:15:34So it's not like you're also getting a dip in the outputs.
00:15:38So stupid, annoying, yes, a huge problem.
00:15:42That's a big blocker.
00:15:44No.
00:15:44So that's where I'm going to leave you guys for this one.
00:15:46I really enjoy using this sort of command center for my Claude OS.
00:15:49I think a lot of people could get some use out of it because like I keep harping on, it's
00:15:54custom.
00:15:54So you just make it work for you.
00:15:56There's no one size fits all.
00:15:58So as always, let me know what you thought.
00:16:01Make sure to check out Chase AI plus if you want to get your hands on the Claude code master
00:16:04class, as well as the prompts to get my exact set of it.
00:16:07This exact thing is kind of what you're going for.
00:16:10And besides that, I'll see you around.
Community Posts
No posts yet. Be the first to write about this video!
Write about this video