Teaching Claude Code My Obsidian Vault

Summary

Claude Code sessions start with a blank slate, knowing nothing about your note organization, coding preferences, or accumulated knowledge. The solution is a CLAUDE.md file at the root of your Obsidian vault that Claude Code reads at the start of every session.

Key Concepts

• CLAUDE.md: A configuration file Claude Code auto-loads, containing instructions about vault organization, coding preferences, and custom workflows
• Knowledge layer: Context files defining interests, collections, and research areas that personalize Claude's responses
• Spotlight integration: Using macOS's mdfind to search through PDFs, research papers, and scanned documents in the vault

Code Snippets

Searching documents with Spotlight

mdfind -onlyin ~/Documents/mauricio "quantum computing"

Extracting text from PDFs

textutil -convert txt interesting-paper.pdf -output - extracted.txt

Practical Applications

1. Daily notes: Say "add this to my notes" and Claude knows the exact path and naming convention
2. Personalized research: Claude filters results based on your interests file
3. PDF retrieval: Find that paper you scanned years ago through natural language search
4. Recommendations: Get suggestions based on your tracked collections

Related

See also writing-a-good-claude-md.