About this episode
Noah Brier discusses how he uses Claude Code as a second brain for notetaking and productivity.
From time to time, we will republish episodes that you might have missed. This episode originally aired in September 2025. Noah Brier uses Claude Code as his second brain—it’s the coolest notetaking setup we’ve ever seen. He has Claude running on a server in his basement hooked up to a VPN. It stores, reads, and writes to thousands of notes in his Obsidian vault. He does it all from his phone. We had him on the show to tell us exactly how he’s pulling this off. Dan and Noah get into: The nuts and bolts of the Claude Code-Obsidian setup: Noah set up Claude Code on top of his Obsidian root directory, and he walked me through how he uses it to prep for an upcoming speech—creating a project folder, pulling in relevant research from his notes, saving transcripts from chats with other LLMs, and generating daily progress updates. The “thinking partner” that lives inside Noah’s second brain: Noah points out that in the hype around AI’s ability to write, the fact that it can read is overlooked. That’s why he has an agent inside Claude Code with strict guardrails to stay in “thinking mode.” It logs his questions, tracks insights, and catches him up on research if he returns to a project…
People in this episode
Host: Dan Shipper
Guest: Noah Brier
Topics covered
- AI
- notetaking
- Claude Code
- Obsidian
- deep work
- productivity
Keywords
- Claude Code
- Obsidian
- notetaking setup
- AI productivity
- deep work
- Noah Brier
Mentioned in this episode
Products: Claude Code, Obsidian
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