Using AI to Create and Maintain A Personal Knowledge System/Memory Palace

[MrLexington]

I've collected ideas and thoughts for years (I won't show you the embarrassing pile of notebooks that I've kept since high school), and only occasionally connected the thoughts one to another. It's humbling an sometimes mortifying to read through old material and see connections that light up ideas in a whole new way.

Some folks have attempted to systematize this idea as Personal Knowledge Management (PKM), popularized in the idea of a "Second Brain" by Tiago Forte and others. Obsidian was built more or less as a lightweight, portable PKM system. It consists of separate notes that can be linked and searched, and even visualized as a node-and-line graph. (Anyone else remember Hypercard? ... anyway.)

I already used Obsidian for capturing ideas, but AI has supercharged it in a way I didn't expect. I've been able to put together a system that captures ideas, finds connections I didn't anticipate, and maintains itself.

There are several parts:

• An Obsidian vault: Obsidian files are kept in "vaults" in folders. Importantly, all they are is a set of Markdown documents (a simple, human-readable text format) that you can find on your hard drive. The Obsidian app itself is what allows the links to jump from one to another, and visualize each document.
• Claude Code (or Cowork) + Andrej Karpathy's "LLM Wiki" prompt: When you work with Claude Code or Cowork, you can "point" it at a folder. Point it at the Obsidian vault you want to turn into this PKM system, then run this prompt from Andrej Karpathy. Karpathy is one of OpenAI's founders, and he designed a prompt that would harness an LLM to turn an Obsidian vault into a wiki. Importantly, it also handles the maintenance ("linting"), including finding stub articles, making connections, and can even go out and research on its own to fill in blanks (when you tell it to).

This setup, on its own, is pretty amazing. At any given point you can tell it to "run the linter" and it will give you a report on blank articles, stubs, orphan articles, and so on. While you have to prompt it, it can largely maintain itself. Also, there is no lock-in: all of your data is right there for you to see, move, add to, copy, or delete as you wish, in human-readable format.

But there's another layer that makes it, in my mind, magic:

• The "MemPalace" memory backend: Milla Jovovich, among others, noticed that there might be a better way for LLMs to maintain their memory. Instead of storing all memories alike in an undifferentiated lake of symbols, she and others created a structure called MemPalace modeled on Renaissance "memory palaces": a powerful mnemonic device that allows for superior semantic recall (i.e., a search by meaning, not by keyword). If you follow the instructions in the GitHub repository, you can install that as a structure for your Obsidian vault-wiki, which makes for more meaningful searches and memory storage. This is especially useful if your PKM roams across very disparate fields of knowledge and you find value in connecting them. (Beware: there are a lot of services trying to copy or duplicate MemPalace because of Jovovich's connection--don't just google it. If you need to, find one of the news articles mentioning it, and that should have a link directly to the GitHub repository.)

This setup alone has already turned my "maybe I'll use it more this month" Obsidian vault into something I am integrating more into daily life. I can interact with it by writing up new articles or by pointing Claude Code/Cowork at it and saying "check on the palace" or "tell me more about [X]"--or, my new favorite: "find five connections between extremely disparate nodes; these should surprise me."

Next step: research by Hermes. My next step is to keep expanding the PKM web by having a Hermes agent researching and adding notes. Those will get caught in the next maintenance cycle, and Claude Code will then expand on them. I don't expect that Hermes will replace my own task of reading the files and making my own additions and connections, but it might surface some new ideas that I can then riff off of.

Other next step: daily integration. Following in @Antifragile's footsteps, I am going to try to put more of my daily life into the Obsidian vault (probably in the form of a daily briefing) in the hopes that the vague, way-out-there concepts in the PKM will connect to the projects I am working through day-to-day. Because the files are Markdown, they are relatively lightweight and don't take up much space--but like everything with agents, there may be invisible escalation that I want to avoid.

As with others in this area, this is an ongoing experiment. But for those of you using Obsidian for PKM, I hope this might be a useful setup.

 

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[shinu]

Tuapft Opvisitvoph.

Og vjot lopf ug ati deti ot quttocmi.

O vjopl ov xuamf ci opvisitvoph vu tii og xi dep ati ov vu neopveop uas lpuxmifhi ecuav opfowofaemt.

Vjopl ug ov et e qistupem simevouptjoq nepehinipv.

 

[shinu]

O gopf nztimg piifoph e qistupem simevouptjoq nepehinipv sidipvmz.

Emvjuahj, vjisi esi eqqt moli nupodejr.

Ov ot vifouat vu neopveop. Vuu nadj gsodvoup.

 

[MrLexington]

Vjisi't pu sietup xjz zua duamfp'v ati e vuum moli vjot vu liiq vsedl ug opfowofaemt' simevouptjoqt, cav vjisi esi qsucecmz civvis vuumt gus vjev. Vjisi esi DSNt (Dupvedv Simevouptjoq Nepehist) uav vjisi vjev esi EO-ipecmif. Vjiz esi hiesif vuxesf temit, tu liiqoph opgusnevoup up, gus iyenqmi, metv dupvedv xovj tuniupi, xjev zua tquli ecuav, xju vjiz duppidv xovj, ivd., ot caomv op.

Vji qsucmin xovj vji vifoan ot vjev vjisi't siemmz pu uvjis xez vu hiv vji opgusnevoup op. Apmitt zua dep fuxpmuef zuas dupwistevoupt vimiqevjodemmz us--epf O xuamf tvsuphmz sidunnipf vjev zua fu puv fu vjot cideati ov ot nutv molimz ommihem xjisiwis zua esi--zua sidusf zuas feomz dupwistevoupt, zua xuamf jewi vu siqsufadi us tannesobi iwiszvjoph vu hiv vji opgusnevoup opvu upi ug vjiti vuumt.