I just asked Claude Code: "Did I ever talk about ASR?" - and in seconds it surfaced everything I'd written across two Obsidian vaults: research paper notes from 2022, work metrics docs, ChatGPT conversations, even references buried in Excalidraw diagrams.
Here's the setup and how you can replicate it.
What this solves
You take notes. You have conversations with LLMs. Over time, this becomes thousands of files across multiple vaults. Obsidian search works, but it doesn't synthesize - it gives you a list of files, not an answer.
The stack
- Obsidian - two vaults: one for knowledge, one for archived LLM conversations
- MCP server (bitbonsai/mcp-obsidian) - gives Claude direct file access to your vaults
- Claude Code* - the CLI that ties it together
*You can use any tool which supports MCP
Exact steps
- Set up your vaults. Separate vaults for different concerns (I use one for notes, one for conversation exports).
- Install the MCP server. Add bitbonsai/mcp-obsidian to your MCP config (~/.config/mcp/mcp_servers.json for Claude Code). Point each instance at a vault path.
- Export your LLM conversations. Tools like chatgpt-export can dump your ChatGPT history into markdown files that Obsidian can index.
- Ask natural language questions. Claude Code searches across vaults, reads the matching files, and synthesizes a summary - not just links, but context, timelines, and connections between notes.
Why this matters
The value isn't in the search. grep can search. The value is in the synthesis: Claude read 14+ files across two vaults and told me that my heaviest ASR focus was on clinical/medical quality - connecting a 2022 research paper to 2024 work metrics I'd forgotten were related.
Your notes are more useful when something can read all of them at once.
MCP link
Cheers
RS