
# 156 Build Karpathy's Second Brain With Obsidian + Claude Code
Build With AI
How Many Vaults to Maintain
Nick and Corey discuss splitting vaults (personal vs business), maintenance tradeoffs, and scaling toward RAG.
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 framework for building an LLM knowledge base. Nick turned it into a free Claude skill with a guided setup wizard, ingest, query, and lint commands -- works across Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, and more. One-click install, no coding required.
* The system runs on three tiers: raw (brain dump), wiki (AI-organized knowledge base), and outputs (answers from querying). Drop files into raw, run ingest, and the AI maps everything into structured wiki entries with relationship graphs.
* You can automate ingestion using Claude Code's loop feature so the vault stays current without manual work. Pair with Obsidian's paid sync tier and a note captured on your phone is indexed before you're back at your desk.
* The lint command health-checks your wiki for outdated entries and missing connections -- and tells you exactly what to clip next to close the gaps. The wiki tells you what it doesn't know yet.
* Day zero this thing is basic. Day 90 it's a company asset no competitor can copy. Your private knowledge base is the foundation for every agent and skill you build -- and nobody else will have it.
Join the Build With AI community - weekly AI implementations, live coaching, and templates built for non-technical entrepreneurs: https://www.skool.com/buildwithai/about
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FIND NICK ON SOCIAL
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholasspisak/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@nickspisak_


