Use Claude Code to clean up Obsidian journal notes

A developer used Claude Code in Obsidian to add links to journal entries and turn rough book notes into polished reviews.

Done with Claude Code· Intermediate

What they did
Kyle Gao ran Claude Code inside his Obsidian vault, where his notes live as plain markdown files. For daily journal entries, he asked it to read the text, find people, places, and books mentioned, look for matching entity notes, and add wiki-links or create new notes when needed. For book ideas, he pasted in a rough bullet list and had it reshape that into a review with sections and quoted passages.
How it went
He said the linking work that used to take 10–15 minutes now finishes in seconds. He also found himself using Obsidian more often because there was less cleanup to avoid.
Tips
A markdown-based vault makes this kind of agent work easier because the tool can search and edit files directly. Even if the system prompt feels tuned for coding, it can still handle note maintenance well.

Try it yourself with Claude Code

Open my Obsidian vault at [folder path]. First, inspect [date range or journal folder] and add links to every person, place, book, or recurring idea you can match to existing notes; create a new entity note when one does not exist, using my usual note style. Then, for each book brain dump I paste in, turn it into a structured review based on [template path]. Before changing more than [number] files or creating anything new, show me a few examples of the edits and wait for my approval.

Fill in the [brackets]. Agents can make mistakes, so review anything before it is sent, paid or deleted.

Read the original on kyleygao.com ↗

Get 3 agent uses like this every morning

With the day's top AI news. Free, and one click to unsubscribe.