obsidian-brain

Obsidian Brain

A Claude Code plugin that turns your Obsidian vault into a persistent brain across sessions. Auto-logs sessions, captures curated knowledge, enables project-scoped context resume, and provides fast search across all historical context.

Why

Claude Code sessions are ephemeral — when you close a session, the context is gone. Your existing CLAUDE.md and memory system help, but they lack:

• Structured search across hundreds of past sessions
• Cross-project pattern discovery (what approaches have I used before?)
• Curated knowledge capture (decisions, error fixes, insights)
• Visual dashboards of your coding history

Obsidian Brain bridges this gap by writing structured markdown notes to your Obsidian vault, where Dataview turns them into a queryable knowledge base.

How It Works

CC Session Lifecycle
    |
    |-- SessionStart --> Injects last-session context hint
    |-- PreCompact ---> Saves context snapshot before compression
    |-- /compress ----> You curate & save specific insights
    |-- /recall ------> Loads project context from vault
    |-- /vault-search > Searches across all sessions & insights
    |-- /standup -----> Generates daily/weekly project summaries
    |-- /standup deep > Evidence-based open-item consolidation
    |-- /emerge ------> Cross-project pattern discovery
    |-- /link --------> Cross-references notes with wikilinks
    |-- /retro -------> Session retrospective & process improvements
    |-- /vault-ask ---> Synthesized answers from vault knowledge
    +-- SessionEnd ---> Auto-logs session to vault

All data flows are one-directional filesystem writes — no MCP server, no REST API, no Obsidian plugins required (except Dataview for dashboards). A local SQLite + FTS5 index enables fast full-text search as the vault scales. Works even when Obsidian isn't running.

Installation

Install

/plugin marketplace add abhattacherjee/obsidian-brain
/plugin install obsidian-brain@obsidian-brain-repo

Then run /obsidian-setup once to point the plugin at your Obsidian vault.

Migrating from the claude-code-skills version

If you previously installed obsidian-brain from the claude-code-skills marketplace, switching is seamless — your config and vault are untouched, so no /obsidian-setup is needed:

1. /plugin marketplace add abhattacherjee/obsidian-brain
2. /plugin install obsidian-brain@obsidian-brain-repo
3. Disable or uninstall the old copy — /plugin uninstall obsidian-brain@claude-code-skills — so only one version is enabled.

Run only one version at a time. Keeping both the monorepo and standalone plugins enabled simultaneously double-registers the session hooks. A built-in guard reduces duplicate notes if both are ever briefly active — it errs toward suppressing a duplicate rather than writing two — but the supported configuration is a single enabled version.

Prerequisites

• Obsidian with the Dataview community plugin installed
• Claude Code CLI available on PATH
• Dataview settings: enable JavaScript Queries and Inline Queries

Setup

Run /obsidian-setup after installation. It will:

1. Ask for your Obsidian vault path
2. Create folders: claude-sessions/, claude-insights/, claude-dashboards/, claude-check-items/
3. Copy Dataview dashboard templates into your vault
4. Write machine-local config to ~/.claude/obsidian-brain-config.json
5. Verify write access with a test file

Skills

Core Skills