Obsidian · the default home of a brain
An Obsidian second brain that starts full.
Every Obsidian vault starts empty, and most die in week two. Second Brain Link generates one from the data exports you already own — LinkedIn, Google Takeout, Facebook, Slack and 23 more — as plain Markdown with typed Properties, resolved links and a Home note. Open the folder in Obsidian. It just works, with no plugin.
What the vault looks like
Numbered layers, one note per thing, every link resolved.
The builder writes a PARA-style vault with numbered folders, so the graph view has a shape from the first open: people in one layer, places in another, your voice in a third — and you in the middle.
00-me/you — one identity note, every export that describes you
10-people/one note per person, across every export, matched by name
15-organizations/companies, clubs, teams — linked to their people
20-reputation/recommendations and endorsements
30-voice/what you wrote: posts, comments, reviews, tweets
40-career/positions, education, applications
50-mirror/how the algorithms see you — inferences and ad profiles
60-learning/interests: subscriptions, stars, playlists, pages liked
80-search/what you searched for, by platform
85-places/saved, visited and photographed places, with a city and a country
90-synthesis/synthesis notes and maps of content
_notes/yours: never touched by a build or an Update
Properties, not prose
Every note carries typed frontmatter — type, sources, city, country, rating, company — which Obsidian shows as native Properties and which Dataview and Bases query as they are. A person note lists every export that knows them; a place note knows its city and its kind.
Links that already resolve
A connection who also appears in your Google Contacts or your Facebook friends is one note, marked Resolved, matched by name — exact after normalising, and no AI decides a merge. A company links to everyone in your network who works there. The graph view shows the real clusters, not a hairball.
A Home note as the map
The build writes a Home MOC and one map of content per layer, so the vault reads top-down the way Obsidian users expect. A company brain gets company-named layers instead — brand, content, pipeline with one note per deal, market view, knowledge, support, signals, locations.
Obsidian + Claude Code (or Codex)
The vault ships with its own guide for your AI.
Point Claude Code or Codex at the folder and it already knows the layout: every brain carries an in-vault CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md that explain the layers, the properties and what each note type means.
The brain builder is itself a cross-model Agent Skill — one engine, packaged for Claude Code and OpenAI Codex. Install it once, say “build my brain from this zip”, and the vault is written on your machine with zero network calls. Ask the same AI a question afterwards and it answers from the notes, citing them, because the structure was made to be read by an agent.
Studio does the same without a terminal: it drives your Claude Code or Codex over the vault, draws the graph, and shows every answer with its Receipts. Open the folder in Obsidian at any time — it is the same files.
# every entity under data/ → one brain each python3 engine/scripts/build_vault.py data -o vault # then open vault/personal/<you>-brain in Obsidian
name-onlyPeople are matched across exports by name only, on purpose — a wrong merge is worse than a miss. Sharper matching is on the roadmap.
Good to know
The honest answers.
Do I need Obsidian? No. Obsidian is the nicest way to browse the files; Second Brain Studio is ours, and Claude Code or Codex read the folder directly. Any Markdown editor opens it.
Do I need a community plugin? No. The frontmatter is typed, so Obsidian shows it as native Properties; wikilinks are already resolved; the Home note is the map. Dataview and Bases read the vault as it is. Plugins like Obsidian Copilot or Claudian work on it unchanged, because it is plain Markdown.
Does anything sync or phone home? Nothing. The build makes zero network calls and the vault is a folder on your disk. Whatever you do with the folder afterwards — Obsidian Sync, Git, iCloud — is your choice and your account; nothing of ours is in it.
What happens to my own notes when I update? Kept. An Update re-imports a newer export in place; your edits stay, a changed generated note is written beside as .new.md, and _notes/ is never written by a build.
Can I build it from Claude Code instead of Studio? Yes. The brain builder is a cross-model Agent Skill: install it for Claude Code or Codex, point it at your exports, and it writes the vault with the same engine Studio uses — locally, with zero network calls.
Not an Obsidian user? The same vault opens in Second Brain Studio, in Claude Code and Codex, and — for a company — in the GBrain format. What a second brain is, if the term is new.
Start
Your vault is already written. It is in your exports.
Free and open source. Build it in Studio, or with the skill in your own terminal.
Second Brain Studio · Mac (Apple silicon and Intel), Windows and Linux · free · MIT
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