Here I’ll describe the approach I use to connect the two. There are other ways to go about it — I’ve tried several — but this one strikes me as the simplest and most efficient. What do you need?
- A Claude Pro account. Same price as everything else in this category — around €20. That’s a pizza and a beer these days. Not bad on its own. But not remotely in the same league. In principle, it can be swapped out for any other AI if needed (see: Obsidian).
- Obsidian. Free for personal use, and even the commercial tier — with Sync and Publish — is very reasonably priced. Worth noting: it’s based in Ontario, well outside the reach of the lunatic.
That’s the shopping list. In terms of skills, the main thing you need is a willingness to just try things: some of this happens in the terminal, but I’ll explain everything clearly enough that you can follow along even without much technical background.
Overview
What are we actually doing here? All your data lives in a single folder that Obsidian uses as its workspace. Obsidian itself is really just a viewer — everything happens at the file and folder level. The files are in standard formats: plain text, ideally Markdown, though other formats can be processed too. This is also why the approach is tool-agnostic: any decent AI should be able to handle it, and so should any PKM application. If it can’t, it doesn’t belong in this setup.
When you install Obsidian, the first thing it asks for is exactly this folder — called a “vault” — and that’s all you need to get started. Ideally, this folder lives somewhere accessible over the network, so you can work from anywhere. iCloud turns out to be suboptimal here (and proprietary). Nextcloud is proven, open source, and my service of choice. In this walkthrough, the vault is called Elysion.
Inside that folder, you open a terminal (on Windows: the command prompt) and launch Claude from there. This gives you Claude Code — but don’t worry: we won’t be writing a single line of code. We’re just chatting, same as always.
I went through this process myself and found it well-guided from start to finish: we accompany the entire setup with AI — Claude itself, naturally. That way, the result is tailored exactly to what you actually want. So:
- Open Claude — preferably using the most capable model available on your desktop.
- Open a terminal in your vault folder and launch Claude Code there (you may need to install it first).
- Open Obsidian and point it to the same folder as your vault.
From that point on, I just talked to Claude and described my situation: that I already had a few key documents, that I had a rough idea for a folder structure (and what did Claude think about it?), and so on. The idea is simply to let yourself be guided — and then act on it: do in the terminal what the two of you (you and Claude) agree makes sense. The result is a structure built around your actual needs. One step before any of that, though:
Preparation: Claude needs to know we’re working with Obsidian
This small extra step makes everything noticeably nicer. Claude already produces Markdown files, but with this configuration they’ll also render beautifully inside Obsidian. The necessary files live in a GitHub repo:
git clone https://github.com/kepano/obsidian-claude /tmp/obsidian-claude
cp -r /tmp/obsidian-claude/skills ~/Nextcloud/Elysion/.claude/skillsFor Windows, you’d enter the following in the command prompt:
(to be added)