Claude Code + Obsidian: My family’s AI brain
Claire Vo talks with math teacher Scott Farrar about running his household with Claude Code and an Obsidian vault of markdown files, so the AI's memory of his home is transparent and trustworthy, plus how AI should support kids learning math.
The gist
-
Farrar switched from chat apps to Claude Code so it reads and writes local markdown files, giving him a visible memory that carries across new sessions.
-
He photographed every appliance and serial number into an Obsidian vault, so asking about the fridge brings up details like a warranty ending in 2027.
-
For car insurance, Claude read the quote documents against his home context and built a checklist, helping him ask his agent much sharper questions.
-
He and his wife share the files through a Dropbox folder, using GitHub only for scripts, and simply avoid editing at the same time.
-
A script pushes to-dos, trips, small daily tasks and a recent wins section to a Dakboard wall display, and Farrar says he has now cleared his backlog.
"Instead of just going with the chat interface, switching over to a coding agent, so in Claude Code, I built this system that would read and write markdown files, so they would have the memory of what we were talking about, and it would be living on my computer so that if I com..."
▶ Play at 4:09110 creators recommend it, including Riley Brown, Liam Ottley, and Claire Vo.
See all on the Claude Code page"If I go over to Obsidian and see the graph view of all the context that I put into Claude, or all the context that Claude can reference, I have kind of all the appliances in my house and all their serial numbers."
▶ Play at 9:0013 creators recommend it, including Ali Abdaal, Greg Isenberg, and Hilary Gridley.
See all on the Obsidian page"The first one was just purely Dropbox, where it was a Dropbox folder that we both had access to, copied on both our laptops... A lot of the stuff is handled with Dropbox and we kind of just know that we're both not really in there at the same time."
▶ Play at 16:32"What I've been using for a little while is a product called Dakboard, which is kind of just a wall display. You can put information on there... and one of the things is you can just put a custom web page in there."
▶ Play at 19:31What they recommend · 4 picks
"Instead of just going with the chat interface, switching over to a coding agent, so in Claude Code, I built this system that would read and write markdown files, so they would h..."
"If I go over to Obsidian and see the graph view of all the context that I put into Claude, or all the context that Claude can reference, I have kind of all the appliances in my ..."
"The first one was just purely Dropbox, where it was a Dropbox folder that we both had access to, copied on both our laptops... A lot of the stuff is handled with Dropbox and we ..."
Also mentioned
Ads in this episode
WorkOS, Jira Product Discovery. They're paid, so we keep them out of the picks above.
See what How I AI recommends without being paid →Related episodes
Episodes covering similar topics
More from How I AI