Note-Taking to Knowledge Infrastructure -Update 2
I started using Claude Cowork Skills a few months back to make my Obsidian vault more like a wiki. I wrote about how I got started and some shoulders I stood on back at the beginning of May. Then I shared a progress update in the middle of May when things were going along pretty nicely.
The links to the two previous posts on this are there just in case any of you want to give this a go yourselves and might find it helpful to see what I used and what I did to get to where I am with this now.
Where I am with this now might be my final update on this, as I don’t really want to turn this into an ongoing saga. Final update is also a good fit because the wiki and the is consistently working well now.
It hasn’t all been smooth sailing. There have been issues with the wiki process and compile phases (including backlogs in the raw folder, leaving notes should have already been processed) scheduled tasks running on time, and permissions granted to the Obsidian Vault and then misunderstood by Mac OS.
The three biggest problems to get past were:
Overlap / conflicting efforts with Claude Cowork and Claude Code
Poor content and overlap on one of the continuous inputs
My weak approach to triaging notes in the wiki
All three have been resolved through the simple fix of keeping things simple. Claude Code is not needed, so I worked with Claude to end up with the same process handled only by Cowork Skills. The Morning Brief input had overlap with the daily AI newsletter analyzer and was difficult to make useful, so it has been dropped. My weak (or dumb) approach to triaging notes in the wiki was to spend a long time once a week on it. Now I spend 20 minutes on it just about every day, and it’s easy.
One big piece added since the last update is Claude Dispatch. Here’s a slice of how Anthropic describes this:
Claude Cowork gives you one continuous conversation with Claude that you can reach from your phone or your desktop. With Dispatch, you can message Claude from your phone and have it work on your desktop computer, using your local files, connectors, plugins, and apps, then come back to the finished work.
Dispatch is great for accessing the notes / knowledge in my Obsidian wiki via my phone. Here are a couple of recent examples:
Asking about cyber threat alerts related notes in the wiki:
And the latest on AI frontier models news:
Now that I’m happy with the Claude + Obsidian Wiki, I’m switching focus to some new cyber-strategy related fun with Claude.
As always I’d love to hear your thoughts on what I’m doing with Claude and Obsidian and trying to wikify, whether you’re doing anything similar or using alternative notes apps / using a different AI tool, anything around this area.