Your AI Second Brain

Learn what this course builds, install Obsidian, open the Seed Vault and find your way around.

1. What Is Your AI Second Brain?

   How a second brain becomes the knowledge foundation that AI apps, skills and connectors can use, and why keeping it portable matters.

2. What is Obsidian?

   Why Obsidian, a local-first note app, is the home for your second brain.

3. Installing Obsidian

   Download and install Obsidian on your computer.

4. Setting Up Your Seed Vault

   Download, open and explore the pre-configured Seed Vault used throughout the course.

5. Navigating the Obsidian Interface

   Find your way around the sidebars, editor modes, settings, command palette and course folders.

6. Getting an API Key (Optional)

   What an API key is, how to get one safely when a later lesson needs it, how to store it and how to revoke it.

The core features you will use every day.

1. Creating and Editing Notes

   Create notes and format them with Markdown, including simple tables.

2. Linking Your Notes

   Connect related notes with internal links.

3. Organizing with Folders

   Set up a simple folder structure that you and AI can both navigate.

4. Tags - Making Your Vault Navigable

   Use inline tags and property tags so you and AI can find related notes.

Add structured data that you, Obsidian and AI can all query.

1. Understanding Frontmatter

   What frontmatter is and why it matters when AI reads your notes.

2. Using the Properties Panel

   Add and edit properties visually.

3. Properties in Practice

   Choose the properties each type of note needs.

4. Obsidian Bases

   Build live tables of your notes from their properties.

Reuse note structures instead of rebuilding them, and see what template automation makes possible.

1. Introduction to Templates

   When templates help, and how core Templates and Templater fit an AI-ready vault.

2. Creating Templates

   Create reusable templates with properties and placeholders.

3. Using Templates

   Insert templates quickly and set up template hotkeys.

Build a capture and review routine you can run by hand now and hand to AI later.

1. Setting Up Daily Notes

   Check or customize the Seed Vault's daily note setup.

2. Capturing with Neurovox

   Optional voice capture that turns what you say into text for your daily notes.

3. Building the Daily Habit

   Keep a daily note habit going and avoid the patterns that make it fall apart.

4. Periodic Review Templates

   Monthly, quarterly and annual reviews that turn daily notes into patterns you can act on.

How AI agents work, how to agree on a plan before they act, and how to keep their work recoverable.

1. What Makes an App Agentic?

   The parts of an agentic system: models, context, instructions, skills, connectors, plugins and safety controls.

2. The Agentic Loop

   Orient, propose, approve, execute and verify: a loop for working with agents.

3. Working Safely with Agentic Tools

   Choose approval levels, keep work recoverable and set guardrails, including for scheduled tasks.

4. Prompting and Testing Agentic Tools

   Agree on the goal, context, plan, limits and checks before an agent starts a task.

5. Choosing Your Agentic Surface

   Pick the AI app that fits the work, the connections it needs and the approval you want.

Use Nexus, the Synaptic Labs plugin for Obsidian, to work with AI inside Obsidian and connect your vault to other AI apps.

1. What Nexus Adds to Your Vault

   Chat, vault tools, workspaces, projects and tasks, plus a CLI and MCP connection for other apps.

2. Verify and Update Nexus

   Verify and update Nexus in the Seed Vault, or install it where it is absent, then find the settings used in this module.

3. What the AI Sees When a Workspace Loads

   How workspaces carry useful context from one session to the next.

4. Connect an External Agent and Run a Use Case

   Connect an outside AI app through the Nexus CLI or MCP and manage a real project on the task board.

5. Optional Provider Setup for Native Chat

   Optional: choose, connect and validate a provider for Nexus chat inside Obsidian using an API key, local model or supported account path.

6. Optional Native Chat in Obsidian

   Optional: use Nexus chat inside Obsidian, inspect context and tool activity first, then complete one recoverable vault action.

7. Extend Nexus with Apps

   Turn on a Nexus app, see what it adds and test it on one task.

Run, schedule, understand and build skills: reusable instructions that turn repeat work into a workflow.

1. What Skills Solve

   Stop pasting the same instructions, and tell prompts, tools, skills, schedules and plugins apart.

2. Use Vault Dreamer

   Run the Seed Vault's Vault Dreamer skill and review its proposed changes before anything is written.

3. Schedule a Skill Through Nexus, Claude, and Codex

   Test and schedule the same skill in three apps, with approvals and recovery in place.

4. Anatomy and Design of a Skill

   How a skill is organized so it runs reliably without overloading the AI's context.

5. Build Meeting Follow-Through with Skill Crafter

   Build and test a skill that turns a meeting transcript into structured follow-up.

Put the pieces together into a practice you can keep up.

1. Designing Your Agentic Knowledge Workflow

   Combine capture, organization, review, AI help and your own judgment into one workflow.

2. Growing Your System Over Time

   Decide when a new tool, plugin, skill or integration is worth adding.

3. Troubleshooting Agentic Work

   Fix common problems with Obsidian, Nexus, AI providers, MCP connections and agent behavior.

4. Best Practices Summary

   The core principles of a portable, local-first AI second brain.

5. What's Next

   Choose your next step: daily use, a first workflow or a first skill of your own.