
# 156 Build Karpathy's Second Brain With Obsidian + Claude Code
From Build With AI by Corey Ganim
April 7, 2026 · 22 min
About this episode
In this episode, Corey Ganim and guest Nick Spisak demonstrate how to build a second brain using Obsidian and Claude Code in under 20 minutes.
Download Nick's free second brain skill -- one-click install that sets up your entire Obsidian vault and ingestion workflow inside Claude Code: https://return-my-time.kit.com/286e11f7e6 I brought on Nick Spisak to build a complete second brain live -- start to finish, in under 20 minutes. By the end of this episode, you'll know exactly how to build your own second brain -- and you can grab Nick's free skill to do it in one click. Timestamps 00:00 - Intro and Karpathy's viral second brain tweet 00:24 - What the second brain concept is 03:28 - Obsidian Web Clipper: scraping pages into your vault 04:41 - Nick's free skill: wizard, ingest, query, and lint commands 05:53 - Live demo: running the setup wizard in Claude Code 08:38 - How many vaults to manage: personal vs. business 10:30 - Opening the vault and exploring the file structure 12:21 - Graph view: seeing connections between your data 15:38 - Ingest command: raw data into organized wiki 16:29 - Automating ingestion on a cron schedule 19:12 - Compounding value and syncing the vault across devices 20:19 - Pruning the vault with the lint command 21:53 - Your data set as a moat in the AI age Key Points * Karpathy released a…
People in this episode
Host: Corey Ganim
Guest: Nick Spisak
Topics covered
- second brain
- Obsidian
- Claude Code
- knowledge management
- automation
- AI tools
Keywords
- second brain
- Obsidian vault
- Claude Code
- ingestion workflow
- automation
- data management
- AI
- knowledge base
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Claude Code, Obsidian, Karpathy, Gemini CLI, Codex
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