Module 2 of 6 · About 30 min
Set up the vault in Obsidian
Have a structured vault, ready for Claude, in fifteen minutes.
Download the starter kitAn empty Obsidian vault, the rules file to fill in and every sentence from the course. A few KB.
In Obsidian, a vault is simply a folder on your computer. Every note is a .md file inside it. That is what makes the whole method work: Claude Code reads and writes files, Obsidian displays them, and neither needs to know about the other.
Step by step
- Download the starter kit below and unzip it where you like, for example in
Documents. - In Obsidian: Open folder as vault, then choose the
my-second-brainfolder. - Open
CLAUDE.md. It is the rules file: module 3 is entirely about it. - In Settings → Files and links, set Default location for new notes to
wiki, and turn on Use [[Wikilinks]].
What each folder is for
| Folder | Contents |
|---|---|
raw/ | Your originals. Claude reads them and never touches them. |
wiki/sources/ | One summary per document added. |
wiki/topics/ | Ideas, methods, notions that come back from one document to the next. |
wiki/people/ | People, organisations, tools. |
wiki/links/ | Notes that connect two topics. Often the most valuable ones. |
wiki/qa/ | Answers to your questions, filed so they don’t have to be recomputed. |
index.md, log.md, themes.md | The catalogue, the log and the theme map. Claude keeps them up to date. |
Why plain files rather than an app
Notion or other online tools would need a connector so that Claude could read them. Here there is nothing to connect: the folder is the database. You can back it up, sync it or open it with any editor.
To do in your vault
Tick as you go: it is kept in this browser.