Obsidian + AI: How to Do It The Right Way

In this video, we're bringing together

AI and Obsidian. I'm going to talk about

how I'm using AI, how I defend my

workflows from the negative effects of

AI, but also how I go on the offense to

use AI in narrowly scoped ways to

superpower key parts of my existing

workflows. I'll share the main tool that

I've picked to combine Obsidian with to

make AI work. And finally, we'll look

into Obsidian's future. When will AI be

added? What has Obsidian CEO actually

said about it? And should we really add

AI to every tool that we use to think

with every day? I'm Nick Milo, and I'm

here to help you do your best thinking

more often. First, let's ask ourselves,

should any of us be using AI with

Obsidian? It goes against some of the

reasons Obsidian is so beloved by so

many of us. It's offline. They're

private files that you own and that only

you have access to. But more

importantly, Obsidian to me has always

represented a sacred thinking space, an

idea verse for my own thoughts. AI

encourages other people's thoughts to

enter into this sacred thinking space.

Your idea verse ends up losing the thing

that made it come alive in the first

place, your voice. For me, Obsidian

isn't just a place for producing or

getting things done. Far from it. I want

it to be my thinking partner, an inner

guide that helps me cultivate my values,

learn over a lifetime, and that allows

me to grow as an individual. That said,

AI is great at many things we aren't.

Like, for example, searching through

every historical mention of a topic over

a massive set of data or quickly

locating a specific passage in a

multi-hour podcast. And that's why I

think of every interaction I have with

AI through the IDI framework. My own

framework to help play defense with AI

while still getting all the upside. The

steps are simple. Imagine, discern,

integrate. AI opens up our imagination.

It's not just doing work for us, but

it's helping us think about what's even

possible with using it as a tool. And

half the time, it might say something

that's completely untrue, but it can

still be useful. D for discernment. We

can imagine something, it spits out

content at us. We can discern, we can

say, "That's not true, but it's still

useful." Then we can imagine something

else, and we go back and forth this way.

Number three, integrate. How do we

connect what we've been working on with

the rest of our lives? How do we link it

to our opportunities as a producer

archetype or as a creative archetype,

the way that we act as individuals? And

here's how that plays out practically.

It's a barbell approach to AI. Let's

start on the defensive side, minimizing

the downsides of AI. First, avoid

overgenerating. Don't allow all this AI

generated text to overtake your own

writing. It can get out of hand really

quickly. Next, it's all about privacy.

What is your personal policy? Decide

where you want to live on this spectrum.

On one side, we have local, which won't

communicate online. That's by far the

safest. On the other side of the

spectrum, you have something like chat

GPT where it's training on everything

and nothing you write is private. This

is the riskiest, but it's also where you

can experiment on the frontiers of

technology. Or you can be somewhere in

the middle. It's cloud-based, but it's

not training on your data. It's on their

servers, but only for a limited time.

Things like cloud code, which we'll talk

about in a minute. Okay. Then on the

offensive side, how can we maximize the

benefits of AI? Well, first, I'm

constantly amazed at how much I've

thought and experienced in the past 30

days. And AI is great at reflecting back

to me those themes and highlights.

Additionally, I want to use AI as the

tip of the spear for deep research. But

the most important guidance I can give

you for having an offensive mindset with

AI is to create a dedicated AI zone.

Have a clear place for your AI generated

content. This way you create a wall of

good friction between anything that AI

generates and any bit of that that you

value highly enough to actually manually

take the time to add it to your personal

idea verse. Okay, now let's make it

real. Here's the best way I found to

apply this framework in Obsidian. And

it's done by combining it with another

app, one that's hyper powerful and

actually easier to use than I expected.

You probably know Claude from Anthropic.

It's an LLM that I'll just refer to as

AI, and it got popular for being a bit

more natural and conversational than

Chat GBT. But Anthropic's lesserk known

product is Claude Code. It's able to

chain together multiple independent

steps and execute on tasks for you based

on files and folders on your computer.

You see where I'm going with this?

Obsidian is an application based on

files and folders stored locally on your

computer. That means Claude Code can

actually analyze your notes on your

computer, edit and restructure them. It

can add important info across hundreds

of notes or even spin up sub aents to

research across the web. You can just

tell Claude Code what you want and it's

going to figure out how to automatically

update your notes. Make sure to always

back up your notes before you do this.

But since this is Obsidian, that means

everything stays in simple markdown

files that you own. So your information

isn't locked into a proprietary format,

and it doesn't make you dependent on

online access to access your personal

knowledge. Here are just like three

really cool things you can do with

Claude Code and your notes in Obsidian.

I'm going to open up the terminal, hit

command on a Mac, and the plus sign.

Let's get this thing a lot bigger. I'm

just going to type Claude. And it's

going to ask me the same question. Do

you trust? Yes. And then in this case,

we're now ready to go. Now, one thing we

need to do is point it to wherever our

idea verse is. Where's that vault on

your computer with all of your notes?

Cloud code is looking at my idea verse,

which is a folder on my computer. And

I'm just going to type in this folder in

my idea verse, analyze all the notes

I've written about in the past 45 days.

I can step away or I can just kind of

observe what it's up to. It started.

Okay, this is exciting. It's analyzing

the past 45 days. Here's the start. Over

the past 45 days, oh, analysis complete.

So, Montana creative work LA business

execution. That's not quite accurate.

That's where discernment comes in. Um,

strong positive emotional trajectory. AI

integration is pervasive. You're deeply

focused on bookw writing. Um, a lot of

good stuff here. and it saved the full

analysis to a different folder on my

computer, a different Obsidian vault,

actually dedicated explicitly only to

AI. So, let's pull that one up now. And

we see it's on screen here. If I twirl

down calendar, then we can start to see

there are analysis of my daily notes

here. And so, this is pretty exciting.

And we can see that this is an analysis

of my daily notes over the past 40 five

days. It's saying that you've been

really focused on bookw writing. Hey,

that's great. Um, and this is me able to

now reflect on what matters to me. And

just look at all this. It's actually

almost 1,000 words. My battle between

producer mode and creative mode. How

that's been helpful to think about

toggling between the two. What's been

going on in the business and the

workshop, my environment and location,

different activities and routines,

cognitive strategies, insights and

breakthroughs. So, these are all ways

that I can reflect as an inner guide on

the things that matter to me. Another

thing I asked was to pull up every use

of the word idea verse I've made in my

idea verse and analyze the patterns. And

so, it's created a to-do list and it's

asking me, I'm going to do this like

thing. I don't even know what it's

asking, like some sort of like way to

analyze a text. I'm like, yeah, proceed.

Don't bother me with that again, please.

So, now it's going to do its work and

let's see what happens. Oh my goodness.

I've mentioned idea verse 2,38

times major findings you naturally think

in idea verse terms peak usage was

actually this last month it would appear

that makes sense I'm talking about it in

the book I'm writing I go here and we

can see all the different findings it's

created a really neat table for me I'm

very curious to look at this later and

say what's actually going on like what

did you analyze and do I believe it is

it true and kind of go from there can

you See how important it is that we have

the good friction between your AI folder

or obsidian vault and your ideaverse

vault with all the notes that matter to

you and your words and your voice with

your ideas. Then I hit the dictation

button and I go okay cloud code I want

some help with metadata. I have all

these notes on people. It's in a

specific folder and you'll notice that

there is a metadata field called image.

I want you to go online for each person

note and actually like grab an image of

them and then it's going to do its thing

and boom, look at this. These are all

these different people that I've made a

note on at some point in my idea verse

and now it's beautiful that they I

actually have an image of them. The

stuff that's possible with Obsidian and

Claw Code is not possible with other

online tools, at least not to maintain

your privacy. And that's why it's so fun

working with AI here because it can

actually be a tool to help me reflect on

the things that I've already identified

as being important to me. And it all

maintains my connection to my dominant

sensemaking archetype. This balances the

power of AI while honoring my own

thinking in a way that I'm finding

exciting but still very human. By the

way, quick note, this is just a small

percentage of what you can do with

Obsidian and Claude when they're working

together. If you want to see the full

details of this build, go ahead and scan

this QR code because inside the linking

your thinking workshop, I'm going to

break down my entire approach to

combining notemaking and sense making

with AI and additionally how to use

Obsidian's new bases feature along with

advanced knowledge management strategies

and a lot more. We've seen how powerful

this combination of tools can be, but it

does lead to an inevitable question. Why

isn't Obsidian doing something like this

in Obsidian itself? Here's what we know.

No AI in Obsidian right now. It's not on

the road map. However, you'll be able to

integrate AI with community plugins and

you'll be able to use it with things

like I've shown with Claude Code. Here's

what Kapano, the CEO of Obsidian, has to

say. I think a lot of tools out there

are just kind of defaulting to this

feeling of, hey, there's this arms race.

We got to put AI into everything. let's

put a little magic button everywhere. I

don't think that that's us. Like, we

want to give users confidence that their

thoughts are theirs. Things are not

going to be used in terms of training

the next uh LLM. That being said, I do

think AI can be really powerful. Our

philosophy as far as how it would ever

make sense to be put into Obsidian, it

would have to be private.

Privacy is what a lot of Obsidian is

based on. the confidence that AI is not

going to train on their data. It's

notion. It's not Google Docs where it's

all in the cloud sitting in there mined

for marketing data hacked all sorts of

things. It can be end to end encrypted.

Only you can view it and that's a really

powerful advantage for people to know

whenever they download Obsidian.

Additionally, and I think this is pretty

interesting, just how Capano is thinking

about AI more generally. He's talking

about how pen and paper is still one of

the best tools for thought.

A lot of our needs as human beings have

not changed at all. People have had ways

to scribble things onto things for

thousands of years. And I think that

Obsidian doesn't necessarily have to do

anything fancier than that to be useful.

I think the most important thing about

Obsidian is just being able to click

links and connect things with links.

It's like that simple. All these apps

and devices and notebooks, they're part

of a stack of tools that you can use to

match to your own goals. As amazing as

pen and paper is, a safe cozy space to

think in, to have some some tasks that

you cross out, you know, I love this

stuff, there's a reason that we want to

take advantage of the digital medium in

a healthy way. If you want to be an

inner guide archetype like I'm often, I

want to be able to bounce between my

digital idea verse and something like

pen and paper. But other times I want to

be a producer. I want to get a lot of

things done. In that case, I'll open up

a tool for thought called the digital

calendar. So we have these stack of

different tools, digital and analog,

that we can use to solve any problem

that we want to in this crazy age of

information that we live in. And one of

those new tools is AI. So instead of

just adding AI to just everything, I

invite you to discover your dominant

sensemaking archetype so that you can

add AI only to the things that matter

for your purposes. And you can do that

in two ways. First, you can take this

simple archetype quiz. It's going to

tell you if you are an inner guide, a

synthesizer, a producer, or a creative

as your dominant sensemaking archetype.

and a recommendation or two on the types

of tools to help you implement your

goals, whether that's Obsidian, Obsidian

combined with AI, or something

completely different. The other thing

you can do is watch the next video in

this series where we're going to talk

even more about tools, including AI,

that can help you unlock your most

important thinking. I'll see you then.