pbrain

pbrain

Daily-ritual scaffolding for Obsidian + Claude Code. Local-first slash commands for journaling, gratitude, fitness, diet, daily planning, brainstorming, and clipping triage. macOS only. Your vault stays on your machine — no accounts, no servers, no telemetry.

Demo

Obsidian is the writing surface. A markdown vault is the corpus (iCloud-synced or plain local — your choice). pbrain slash commands handle the rituals. Optionally, gbrain adds an AI memory layer exposed to Claude via MCP.

Compatibility: macOS only (Obsidian Desktop + iCloud Drive container). iOS works for read/write through the synced vault on iPhone/iPad, but the slash commands themselves run from Claude Code on macOS (or the OpenAI Codex CLI — see Codex interoperability). Linux, Windows, and Android aren't supported.

The pbrain slash commands work against any vault directory you point them at — PBRAIN_VAULT env var, a path written to ~/.config/pbrain/vault, or the default iCloud Obsidian path. /init-obsidian handles the setup. Obsidian is optional — the vault is just plain markdown. If you never configure one, the first command you run auto-creates a plain local vault at ~/pbrain-vault and keeps going, so pbrain works on a fresh machine with zero setup (run /init-obsidian later to switch to an Obsidian/iCloud vault).

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Architecture

The flow:

• Obsidian (Mac + iOS) — where you write — syncs the vault/ (a standalone git repo) across devices over iCloud.
• The vault holds life/ (daily journal), domain folders (fitness/, startup/, side-quests/, software-dev/, …), and agent-work/ (everything Claude generates — brainstorms/, chat-history/, drafts/, notes/, research/, people/).
• A launchd job runs gbrain sync every 30 min, indexing the vault into a local gbrain index (PGLite + Ollama embeddings, ~/.gbrain/ — local-only, free, private).
• Claude Code and Claude Desktop both reach that index over MCP (stdio).

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Quick start

The stack is three independent layers — pick what you need.

Minimal: plugin + vault (everyone starts here)

# 1. Install the plugin — two steps (register the marketplace, then install)
/plugin marketplace add baymac/pbrain
/plugin install pbrain@pbrain
#    If either step fails, use the Local development path below — same
#    commands, just symlinked from a local clone.

# 2. Bootstrap a vault — checks for Obsidian, creates the vault,
#    optionally migrates it to iCloud for mobile sync, sets up a private
#    notes dir, writes config. Idempotent.
/init-obsidian

# 3. Start using it
/journal              # morning anchor — raw dump first, clears the head
/gratitude-journal    # then gratitude, on cleared ground (second)
/brainstorm "idea"    # quick idea dump
/plan-my-day          # goal-anchored daily planner (first run sets up your goals)

That's it for the core experience. /init-obsidian writes ~/.config/pbrain/vault so every other command knows where to write.

What /init-obsidian does

First-run setup — you only need it once. Every other command reads ~/.config/pbrain/vault and just works after this is done. Re-running is safe (idempotent) but only useful if you're switching vault locations, adding a git remote later, or adding the private dir after the fact.

Step by step: