🤖 AI Summary
Overview
Noah Brier shares his groundbreaking setup for using Claude Code as a second brain,
enabling him to think, research, write, and even ship code directly from his phone. He walks through his workflow, which integrates Claude Code with Obsidian, a note-taking app, and explains how this setup has transformed his productivity. The episode also delves into the broader implications of AI in work, education, and creativity.
Notable Quotes
- There's entirely too much focus on AI's ability to write and not enough focus on its ability to read.
– Noah Brier, on the overlooked power of AI as a research and thinking tool.
- Claude Code has become such a sort of integral part of my life, I feel like I can just be anywhere and work on deep projects—even from my phone.
– Noah Brier, on the transformative impact of his mobile Claude Code setup.
- If there's a tool that can allow a 10-year-old to build an app, there can't be a bubble.
– Noah Brier, on the democratizing potential of AI tools like Claude Code.
🛠️ The Claude Code-Obsidian Setup
- Noah uses Claude Code on a home server synced with his Obsidian vault, which organizes his notes as markdown files.
- His workflow includes:
- Creating project folders for specific tasks, like preparing a talk.
- Pulling in relevant research from his entire note archive.
- Saving transcripts from chats with other AI tools like ChatGPT and Grok.
- Generating daily progress updates to track insights and ideas.
- He emphasizes starting Claude Code in the root directory of Obsidian to access all notes and using a package.json file to enable custom commands.
🧠 Claude Code as a Thinking Partner
- Noah created a specialized agent within Claude Code to act as a collaborative thinking partner.
- This agent:
- Asks probing questions to help him refine ideas.
- Logs insights and tracks progress without jumping to generate final outputs.
- Summarizes recent work to help him re-engage with projects after breaks.
- He stresses the importance of explicitly instructing AI to stay in thinking mode
rather than defaulting to artifact creation.
📱 Deep Work on Mobile
- Noah's mobile setup involves running Claude Code on a home server accessed via a VPN and terminal app.
- This allows him to:
- Conduct deep research and brainstorming sessions from his phone.
- Make real-time edits to code repositories, even while away from his computer.
- Use downtime productively, such as working on a talk while sitting outside or during a commute.
- He has even set up partitions on his server for friends to replicate this mobile workflow.
👨👩👧 Preparing Kids for AI
- Noah integrates AI into his parenting, encouraging his children to use tools like Claude Code and Grok for creative projects.
- His 10-year-old recently built a Secret Santa
app using AI, learning data modeling concepts in the process.
- He advocates for teaching media literacy and critical thinking skills to help kids navigate AI responsibly.
- Recommends The Truth Detective by Tim Harford as a resource for fostering skepticism and discernment in evaluating information.
- Noah believes education should focus on inspiring curiosity and teaching meta-skills, like evaluating AI outputs, rather than rote memorization.
🌌 The White Space in AI
- Noah highlights the vast unexplored potential of AI, emphasizing that we're still in the early stages of understanding its capabilities.
- He shares his Thomas' English Muffin theory of AI,
likening AI's ability to integrate into workflows to filling the nooks and crannies of existing systems.
- He sees AI as a tool to reduce bureaucracy and enable more flexible, decentralized ways of working, allowing individuals and teams to maintain their preferred workflows.
AI-generated content may not be accurate or complete and should not be relied upon as a sole source of truth.
📋 Episode Description
From time to time, we will republish episodes that you might have missed. This episode originally aired in September 2025.
Noah Brier uses Claude Code as his second brain—it’s the coolest notetaking setup we’ve ever seen.
He has Claude running on a server in his basement hooked up to a VPN. It stores, reads, and writes to thousands of notes in his Obsidian vault. He does it all from his phone.
We had him on the show to tell us exactly how he’s pulling this off.
Dan and Noah get into:
The nuts and bolts of the Claude Code-Obsidian setup: Noah set up Claude Code on top of his Obsidian root directory, and he walked me through how he uses it to prep for an upcoming speech—creating a project folder, pulling in relevant research from his notes, saving transcripts from chats with other LLMs, and generating daily progress updates.
The “thinking partner” that lives inside Noah’s second brain: Noah points out that in the hype around AI’s ability to write, the fact that it can read is overlooked. That’s why he has an agent inside Claude Code with strict guardrails to stay in “thinking mode.” It logs his questions, tracks insights, and catches him up on research if he returns to a project after a few days away.
How Noah does deep work on his phone: Noah rigged a home server in his basement, put his Obsidian vault in it—and then runs Claude Code on top. Noah says that being able to think, write, research, and ship code from his phone has fundamentally changed the way he works.
This episode is a must-watch for anyone curious about who wants to learn how to use Claude Code to build a true second brain.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
Timestamps:
00:00:52 - Introduction
00:02:10 - How you can do deep work on your phone
00:05:30 - Why Noah thinks Grok has the best voice AI
00:11:11 - The nuts and bolts of Noah's Claude Code-Obsidian setup
00:26:05 - Using an agent in Claude Code as a "thinking partner"
00:30:23 - Noah's Thomas' English Muffin theory of AI
00:39:47 - The white space still left to explore in AI
00:48:44 - How Noah is preparing his kids for AI
01:00:06 - How he brought his Claude Code setup to mobile
Links to resources mentioned in the episode:
Noah Brier: https://www.noahbrier.com/, Noah Brier (@heyitsnoah) / X
Alephic, his AI strategy consultancy: alephic.com
The conference he leads about marketing and AI: