How Claude
stopped forgetting me.

Each new session started cold.

I work with Claude for hours every day: brand work, worldbuilding, scripts, video prompts, business strategy. Every morning I'd open a new chat and re-explain everything. Who I am, what I'm building, what I decided yesterday, where we left off.

I caught the pattern early. Re-orienting Claude each morning was friction I knew I could design away.

It wasn't Claude's fault. I had no system, no place that lived outside the chat window for both of us to look at. My notes were in five apps, my decisions in screenshots, my memory in my own tired head.

Three pieces, one nervous system.

The shift was small in tools and huge in what it changed. I added two things to Claude. That's it.

The order matters. Obsidian without Claude is a folder of notes you never re-read. Claude without Obsidian is a brilliant stranger who forgets your name. Add Graphify and the whole thing starts thinking with you instead of behind you.

A folder that becomes your memory.

Obsidian is a free app for writing notes in plain markdown. You pick a folder on your computer, point Obsidian at it, and that folder is now your vault. Every note is a small .md file on your disk. No cloud lock-in, no proprietary format. Open the folder in Finder and it's just files.

What it does for you. You write a note. You link to another with [[double brackets]]. Now your notes know each other: backlinks form automatically, and search runs across everything you've written in milliseconds. The more I write, the more useful it gets.

Why it matters for Claude. Claude can read and write to the same folder. So when I tell Claude something today (a decision, a brand rule, a creative beat), it goes into a note. Tomorrow's Claude reads it and already knows. The vault becomes the shared memory between every session. No more re-explaining.

Three things you can do, day one.

1. a/Write a note about what you're working on today. Title it. Save it. That note now exists in plain text on your disk, forever.
2. b/Type [[ and start linking notes together. Mention an idea, project, or person. Obsidian auto-suggests existing notes and creates the backlink instantly.
3. c/Point Claude at the same folder. Now Claude reads your notes when answering, and can save new notes when you decide things together. The vault becomes shared memory.

A brain that wakes up.

Graphify is an open-source skill that reads every file in your folder (markdown notes, PDFs, code, images, even video transcripts) and builds a queryable knowledge graph. It captures the people, ideas, places, and decisions in your work, and the edges between them. It runs locally, so your content never leaves your machine.

Why it matters. A 100-file vault might be 200,000 tokens raw. Graphify compresses that into a few thousand tokens of structured signal Claude can read in milliseconds. Up to 71.5× fewer tokens per session, and Claude finds threads you'd lost track of yourself.

What you get. A folder called graphify-out/ next to your vault, containing a graph report, a navigable HTML graph viewer, and a JSON file Claude reads automatically. Open the HTML in your browser and you can walk the connections yourself. They're often surprising.

Using it in three moves.

1. a/Point it at a folder. Run graphify ./vault --obsidian and walk away. Ten minutes later you have a graph.
2. b/Tell Claude where it is. One line in CLAUDE.md: "Before answering, read graphify-out/GRAPH_REPORT.md." Claude will check the graph first, always.
3. c/Re-run when you've written a lot. Add new notes, run the same command, the graph refreshes. Your brain grows with you.

Where the two meet.

Obsidian alone is a great notes app. Graphify alone is a graph tool. The reason this works is what happens when you put them in the same folder.

Obsidian gives Graphify clean material. Because everything you write is plain markdown, with [[backlinks]] already in the text as signal, Graphify gets a structured corpus to graph instead of a pile of random files. The links you draw by hand become the scaffolding the graph builds on.

Graphify adds what Obsidian misses. Obsidian shows the links you made. Graphify shows the links you didn't: clusters the AI found across your vault, neighbours you'd forgotten you wrote about, a project forming before you'd noticed it. Your manual links plus the inferred ones make a richer map.

Both together serve Claude. The vault is the source of truth (your actual notes). The graph is the compressed index Claude reads first. Claude answers from the index, writes new notes back to the vault, and the next graph re-build folds those new notes in. The loop closes. Each piece makes the other two better.

What it actually feels like.

A normal Monday in my studio. Three concurrent projects, two clients waiting, one creative thread I want to keep alive in the background.

• 9:00 · morning open
  I greet Claude. It reads my "Tomorrow" handover note from last night and knows exactly where we left off. No re-explaining.
• 11:00 · context switch
  A client asks about a project we last touched two weeks ago. Claude pulls the relevant decisions from the graph in seconds. No screenshots, no scrolling, no "remember when we talked about…"
• 14:00 · connection I didn't see
  Graphify surfaces a link in the report: a brand thread connects to a workflow lesson I'd written three weeks earlier. The graph saw it. I hadn't.
• 17:00 · wrap
  We write a "Tomorrow" note together. Claude saves it to the vault. Tomorrow's Claude will read it first thing. The thread never drops.

It sounds small written out. Living in it changes how you trust the tool. Claude went from assistant I talk at to partner I plan with.

10 minutes to your own setup.

None of this requires being a developer. If you can copy a command and click an install button, you have everything you need.

uv tool install graphifyy && graphify install

graphify claude install

From there, the magic comes from writing. Start small: one note for what you're working on today. A "Tomorrow" handover note before you stop. A decision log when something feels worth remembering. Don't organize everything upfront. The graph will find the connections.