What Happens When You Install This

After a meeting: /obsidian-save Claude pulls out every decision, person, task, and idea and saves each one to the right note. You do nothing.

You recorded a voice memo: /obsidian-ingest meeting.m4a Claude transcribes it with Whisper, identifies speakers, extracts every promise and action item, and distributes across entity pages, task boards, and the daily note.

You screenshot a whiteboard: /obsidian-ingest photo.png Claude reads the image, extracts text and structure, creates concept notes, links to related projects. A photo becomes knowledge.

You find a great video: /obsidian-ingest https://youtube.com/... Claude doesn't summarize into one note. It REWRITES your existing pages. People get updated. Contradictions get resolved. Patterns trigger new synthesis pages. One URL in. The vault is smarter.

Before a big decision: /obsidian-challenge Claude searches your vault for past failures and reversed decisions on the same topic. Pushes back with your own words. Your vault holds you accountable.

You want to see the big picture: /obsidian-visualize Claude generates a visual canvas of your entire vault. Hub nodes centered, color-coded by type, orphans highlighted. Open it in Obsidian and see the shape of your knowledge.

You go to sleep: The nightly agent runs 5 phases: closes the day, reconciles contradictions, synthesizes cross-source patterns, heals orphan notes, and rebuilds the index. You wake up to a smarter vault.

You start a new day: /obsidian-daily Claude pulls your calendar events, overdue tasks, and overnight changes into today's note. Your morning starts informed.

Someone shares an X post: /x-read https://x.com/... Grok with live X access fetches the post, the thread, and the replies. Returns verbatim text + TL;DR + key claims + reply sentiment + voices to watch. No more screenshots.

You're planning today's content: /x-pulse "AI automation" Grok scans X for what's trending in your topic right now. Returns 3-5 emerging themes (with rep posts + key voices), gaps nobody is filling, hook formats that are working, and 3 specific post ideas you could write today.

You need real research: /research "AI memory tools" Perplexity Sonar Pro pulls a deep dossier with citations: summary, key facts (every claim with a recency marker and source domain), timeline, key players, contrarian views, recommended further reading, open questions. Saved to your vault, auto-opens in Obsidian.

You want vault-first deep research: /research-deep "AI memory tools" Scans your vault for what you already know. Identifies gaps. Spawns 3-5 targeted searches via Perplexity (web) and Grok (X discourse). Synthesizes a delta report: what's new, what's confirmed, contradictions to resolve, recommended vault updates. Vault baseline doesn't get re-researched. Only gaps get filled.

You hit a great YouTube video: /youtube https://youtu.be/... Free transcript via youtube-transcript-api. Optional metadata + top comments via YouTube Data API v3. Grok summarizes into TL;DR, Key Points, Notable Quotes (verbatim), Themes, Comment Sentiment, and Worth Following Up On. Saved as an AI-first note in your vault.

You never open Obsidian. Everything happens through Claude.

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Install

One codebase, six platforms. Pick yours below. The vault behavior is identical across all of them; only the install path and the dispatcher file (CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md / GEMINI.md / .pi/) differ.

then follow dist/hermes/INSTALL.md (copy into ~/.hermes/skills/ or add as a tap)

This is the skill/playbook half of the Hermes work; the bounded vault-data half is the [MCP connector](integrations/obsidian-mcp-server/). Native cron and lifecycle-hook integration are tracked in [Issue #79](https://github.com/eugeniughelbur/obsidian-second-brain/issues/79).

Point OpenCode at Hermes via OpenRouter. Authenticate once (`/connect`, search OpenRouter, paste your key - or `export OPENROUTER_API_KEY=...`), then in `opencode.json`:

Hermes models on OpenRouter (as of 2026-06, openrouter.ai):

For the privacy story, run a smaller Hermes locally through Ollama or LM Studio and point OpenCode at the local endpoint - no data leaves your machine.

What to expect (open models follow instructions less reliably than Claude, so this is honest, not a promise of parity): the core commands - /obsidian-save, /obsidian-daily, /obsidian-capture, /obsidian-find, /obsidian-task, and /research in free mode - hold up well. The sub-agent-heavy commands and the deep synthesis ones (/obsidian-architect, /obsidian-reconcile, /research-deep) lean hard on instruction-following, so prefer hermes-4-405b (or Claude) for those. The AI-first vault rule still applies on every write regardless of model.

Research toolkit (optional)

The 6 research commands need API keys. Run install.sh and answer "y" to the research prompt. That sets up ~/.config/obsidian-second-brain/.env. Or do it manually:

```bash mkdir -p ~/.config/obsidian-second-brain cp .env.example ~/.config/obsidian-second-brain/.env chmod 600 ~/.config/obsidian-second-brain/.env

Semantic search (optional, off by default)

Search (/obsidian-find and the MCP connector) works out of the box as fast keyword search - no setup, no model, nothing to install. You can optionally add a meaning-based layer that finds notes even when your query shares no words with them. It is opt-in by setup and, when present, fuses with keyword search (measured best of both: keyword recall@10 80% -> 91%, paraphrased 17% -> ~46% on a 1,000-note vault). If the model is ever unreachable, search silently falls back to keyword - it never breaks or hangs.

Two ways to provide the embedding model:

• Local + private (recommended), via Ollama: install Ollama, ollama pull mxbai-embed-large, then build the index once: uv run python scripts/eval/semantic_search.py --path "<vault>" --build. Your notes never leave the machine.
• No Ollama? Any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Set OBSIDIAN_EMBED_BACKEND=openai, OBSIDIAN_EMBED_URL=<base url>, OBSIDIAN_EMBED_MODEL=<model>, and OBSIDIAN_EMBED_KEY=<key if needed>. This covers other local runtimes (LM Studio, llama.cpp's server) for free/private use, or a cloud API (OpenAI, a gateway) for top quality - note a cloud endpoint means note text leaves your machine, so use OBSIDIAN_EMBED_EXCLUDE=<folder prefixes> to keep private folders local-only.

Knobs: OBSIDIAN_SEARCH_SEMANTIC=0 disables the layer entirely; the index is rebuilt incrementally (only changed notes re-embed) so re-run --build occasionally as the vault grows. The index file is large and regenerable - gitignore it.

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Codex CLI / Gemini CLI / OpenCode

git clone https://github.com/eugeniughelbur/obsidian-second-brain
cd obsidian-second-brain
bash scripts/build.sh --platform codex-cli   # or gemini-cli, or opencode
cp -R dist/codex-cli/. /path/to/your/vault/   # or .gemini-cli / .opencode/

Then start your CLI from the vault root.

The Codex build emits native Codex Agent Skills: one skill per command under .agents/skills/<name>/SKILL.md. Codex discovers them automatically with progressive disclosure (only each skill's name + description load until it's selected), and they run in your current session - invoke one with $<name>, pick it from /skills, or just describe the task and let Codex match it implicitly. AGENTS.md stays as a thin always-on manual (vault conventions + the AI-first rule); there is no routing table to maintain because the skill list is the router. The Gemini / OpenCode builds still emit a GEMINI.md / AGENTS.md dispatcher with an auto-generated routing table to command files under .gemini/ / .opencode/.

Run bash scripts/build.sh with no arguments to build every platform at once. See dist/<platform>/INSTALL.md after building for platform-specific notes.

Do I need API keys to use this?

Mostly no. The vault commands (/obsidian-save, /obsidian-daily, etc.) need no API keys. /research and /research-deep are also key-free now - with no Perplexity key they automatically fall back to free, key-less sources (Wikipedia, HackerNews, arXiv, Reddit, and more) and Claude synthesizes the dossier. The remaining research commands (/x-read, /x-pulse, /notebooklm, /youtube, /podcast) need their respective keys (xAI Grok, Perplexity, Google Gemini, optionally YouTube Data API v3 / OpenAI Whisper) and exit with a clear setup message when one is missing. The calendar command (/obsidian-calendar, all four modes) needs the Google Calendar MCP connector rather than an API key.

Is this an Obsidian plugin or a Claude Code skill?

This is a Claude Code skill, not an Obsidian plugin. An Obsidian plugin lives inside Obsidian and adds UI features there. A Claude Code skill lives inside Claude Code (Anthropic's terminal AI coding agent) and gives Claude the ability to read, write, and reason over your Obsidian vault from outside Obsidian. You install this skill into Claude Code, not into Obsidian. Your vault is unchanged, just better-leveraged.

Can I have a separate vault per project (multi-repo workflows)?

Yes. The default scripts/setup.sh writes OBSIDIAN_VAULT_PATH globally to ~/.claude/settings.json, but every hook in this skill reads that env var at fire-time. Claude Code merges per-project .claude/settings.json on top of the global one, so you can put {"env": {"OBSIDIAN_VAULT_PATH": "/path/to/repo-vault"}} in each repo's .claude/settings.json and Claude will use that repo's vault whenever you launch a session from that directory. The slash commands and hooks remain globally installed; only the vault path changes. Full recipe in SKILL.md. One thing this does NOT give you: isolation within a single vault (no --scope on commands yet).

FAQ