How I AI - Claude Code + Obsidian: My family’s AI brain | Scott Farrar

0:00When you're using like the web or chat GPT or Claude, you're like, what does it really know about me? What does it really remember? What information does it have? Like that is very opaque to most people. I wanted to build a system where I was confident that AI was grounded in my truth. So in Claude code, I built this system that would read and write markdown files so they would have the memory of what we were talking about. I have all the appliances in my house and all their serial numbers. I might go start a new chat here and say, what's going on with the fridge? And it knows the warranty information because I put that in there at some other time. I'm going to drop it to Claude. What do I need to be thinking about in this house? Let's actually go to Claude here and say, like, hey, do I need to plan for earthquakes?

0:52Welcome to How I AI. I'm Claire Vo, product leader and AI obsessive here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. We have talked about Claude for work. We have talked about Claude for coding. We have talked about Claude for kids, but we have not talked about Claude for the homeowner. If you are adulting hard, then this is the episode for you. We talked to Scott for our who has a obsidian vault.

1:22of everything in his house, and a set of clawed skills that keeps his dry route under control and his insurance quotes as cheap as they can be. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. AI has already changed how we work. Tools are helping teams write better code, analyze customer data, and even handle support tickets automatically. But there's a catch. These tools only work well when they have deep access to company systems.

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2:42Scott, welcome to How I AI, parent, busy parent, busy dad, busy household manager edition. Busy adulting. Busy adulting. We have so much, so many questions. Everybody always asks like, we need more parents on, we need more people handling their busy lives. And so when I saw some of the stuff that you were doing, I was so excited for you too.

3:08demo it for us. So walk us through what your busy adulting looks like and what problem you were trying to solve. I have kids. I've got a career and it's like hard to juggle everything. And if I come up with a question like, oh, should I do I have the right car insurance? Do I need to change that? You know, lots like lots of people I might come to. Yeah, I might go to the chat and have it help me out. But the problem I was having there is if I start doing a complex problem with chat, it's like, well, do I dump my information in there. Do I give it all the context into this chat here? And as the conversation goes, is it drifting? What is it really remembering about me? And so I wanted to build a system where I was confident that AI was grounded in my truth and knowing what it knows about me so that I could be confident in what advice it was giving me back. So what I did instead of

4:03just going with the chat interface, switching over to a coding agent. So in Cloud Code, I built this system that would read and write files, read and write markdown files. So they would have the memory of what we were talking about. And it would be living on my computer so that if I come back later, it started new.

4:25chat session or cloud code session, you can reference those same files. So if I, here's kind of a sample of the car insurance question in progress where, like, oh, I've been working on this. How's that third quote come in? Like, we were getting quotes from people, like, oh, it summarized. It has some quotes here on here. It's like, well, should I update that car insurance? What gaps do I have in the coverage? So it's read the documents that I put in the file holder. This has been a huge unlock of, like, both my confidence and what it knows about me, but also just when it can build me like a checklist of what to do, then it keeps me moving forward. So the problem that you're trying to solve here really is when you're using like the web, you know, chat GPT or cloud, you're like, what does it really know about me? What does it really remember? What information does it have? Like that is very opaque.

5:18to most people, but once you download these desktop apps, whether it's cloud, code, cloud, co-work, chat, gbt, chat, gbt, codex, whatever you're working with, they can write, it can write to your desktop or to your desktop, to your computer. And what you're saying is then you just tell it to use markdown files as kind of like your very transparent source of truth, source of knowledge.

5:45that any question about your household can answer. And then you're using that, if you could just show us the kind of like Claude session, you're using that to do things like update your insurance, like check, are you up to date on your insurance? What do you need and get quotes? Can you walk us through just that like experience of getting car insurance and quotes and what did well with using that through code versus what kind of failed?

6:15I started with was just saying, well, should I update this? And in the conversation or in updating another insurance, I said, well, one of these people gave you a quote, said, you need to update the cars. And you also wanted this other policy. And in the previous years, I might have been like, wow, there's a headache. I might come back to this. But I might say, well, what should I do next? I want this project.

6:44And because it's a very loose question, but because I'm grounded on what I'm working on here, it comes back with the responses. Oh, your next step is email Dana Whitfield as a fake person. But that's the blocker and say like, you should email, ask this question of like, what is it that I really need here? And these are the questions that you need to have answered before you can make an informed decision on car insurance.

7:13And I mean, how would you have done this before? Because I'll tell you exactly how I would have done it before. I wouldn't have done it. Yeah. I think what I would have done is actually it requires maybe a lot more trust in your insurance agent. Not that I don't necessarily trust them, but it meant that like I wouldn't have read those documents in detail. And so with the power of AI, you can read it via the AI's. And then I wanted to bring in my own home context and have that system mesh with what the insurance agent was giving me. And then I was able to ask way more detailed questions and email back and forth with the insurance agent and know exactly what I was asking and know exactly what they were telling me. Okay, so for you, the secret sauce is context. And we've seen a couple of these. I see that you have obsidian. We've seen a bunch of these like personal brains. What I loved about your personal brain is you're a lot more...

8:13comprehensive in the type of household information you put in that personal brain. So like, what are you putting into your obsidian? What do you think goes into that context that you think lets you do more stuff within the household than other folks? Yeah. So actually, let's start just a picture of the insurance project itself. This is a markdown file. This is like the picture of the memory that Claude was working with. It's going constantly referencing back what it knows here, and it will update information as it goes. And there's the checklist of, like, oh, yeah, that is the blocking step I needed to email the Dana person. But it also is going to, at a wider view, like, this is one of the project files in here. But if I go over to Obsidian and see the graph view of all the context that I put into Claude, or all the context that Claude can reference,

9:07I have kind of all the appliances in my house and all their serial numbers or like here's a picture, a fake picture of the range for the serial number of the refrigerator and like, oh, when is the, when is my kid's iPad gonna lose iOS support, software updates?

9:31Yeah, so I might just put that information in. They're on OS, such and such, or it's this model from 2019 or something. So actually, when I set this system up, I said to Claude, what information should I gather about my house? I asked it, and I said, perhaps, what about the refrigerator? And said, well, actually, you go around and take pictures of every appliance in your house. And so that's actually what all these yellow files are, the pictures.

9:57They are summed up on this appliances list on another markdown file. And Claude is enforcing the rules of how it's organized. And while I can inspect the memory here in the markdown file itself, I often am actually just using Claude itself. I might go start a new chat here and say, what's going on with the bridge? And it's going to go read.

10:24So the database look for exactly what what am I talking about with the fridge? And maybe I'll say like because the ice maker and programming itself. Wait, hold on. I have to pause because are all houses the same? Because do you know what the number one problem in my house right now is? My broken ice machine in my refrigerator. I am like not even.

10:50Kidding we have a grok bot that is like dealing with our refrigerator repair people young young people just this episode is not for you this episode is for people who Need they're not one of those fancy little nugget ice makers that you put on the on the countertop on tiktok. We're talking a good ol stainless steel refrigerator Ice maker always broken Yeah, yeah So, yeah, when you have that problem, you're using GrokBind. Actually, it'll be interesting. We can talk about it the contrast with bots and dots and muses and instinct and those types of things, too. But here, what I will do is I might go into the appliances and look at that list, that Markdown file itself. I could if I wanted to. I see all the memory there. But really, I'm going to Cloud Code often. And it's just starting a new chat and saying, what do I do? It's very loose.

11:46And I'm like, help me make a plan. And so it might come back and say, well, you know what? Oh, bad news. It's going to cost you. The warranty is going to run out in 2027. It knows the warranty information because I put that in there at some other time. So that's been super powerful. Actually, a lot of this is influenced by my dad because in a pre-AI era, my dad and his file cabinet are actually just like AI.

12:15because he'll have all the receipts and all the warranty information. And he says that I can still ask him, like, hey, how did you do this when you were solving this? He's like, oh yeah, I have this file from 1978. Let's see. Yeah, the fridge then did such and such. So every time I ask Claude this, I'm like, this is just what my dad did naturally. I have this kind of like hypothesis that there are two types in the world.

12:44There are like notion boys and not notion boys and like you don't even have to use notion to be a notion boy. But like you have to have that like thing in you that's like I'm gonna file this stuff. I'm gonna organize it. I'm gonna tag it. I am not, I'm the opposite. I am a type B large language model. You just dump in unstructured context and you're gonna get the next token out. But I do think it's funny when you see people's kind of like mental model of the world go into how they design their AI systems. Everything from like hyper-organized, obsidian nodes and structure to like, I don't know, I have a video of my refrigerator somewhere and I photos go find it and then Tali was like, what's going on with it? Well, I think that's actually see what I really like is the loose kind of

13:40spectrum between the type A type B here where I was able to dump in a lot of unstructured information and rely on the coding agent to structure it and maintain that structure. Actually, part of the system here is like there's a linting script that goes through and make sure that verbose chat agents haven't expanded too much that making my to-do list to verbose or something.

14:09I think actually that was really, I was really inspired by kind of how these agents can just unlock files that's been on my computer forever. And just I've always known the data's in there, somewhere in there. I don't have time to sort through it right now. I would love it to manually go through and sort this, but I never have. But with Cloud Code, with Codex, you know, you give it a directory and it can go through there and pull out.

14:39and organize all this stuff in an amazing way. One of the files actually that I really come back to a lot in the manual way is the to-do list, the massive to-do list. So I said, I had it create this. I'm like, you know, me and my wife, we had a brainstorming session of like, what is every single to-do item in our brain big and small? Is it fixing the tub spout in the kid's bathroom that just doesn't spray quite right?

15:06Uh, is it, uh, oh, there's going to be dry rot. We have a multi-thousand dollar dry rot problem. Or do we, or like, how do we find out if that's true or not? Uh, and so like, uh, compile those into things, give me a priority level, give me a cost estimate, give me a priority and reference. So this, this is the file I come back to a lot, the to-do file. I love that because it, we, we, it was very similar household. It's like, I have a dry rot problem.

15:35Am I getting scammed by my dry rock guy? Did the dry rock guy do his job? And I do think, you know, how do you and your wife collaborate on this? That's my question on. We talk a lot about multiplayer in the enterprise. Tell me about multiplayer in the home. Yeah. Yeah, that was one of the earliest things that I talked about as I was setting this up. So setting this up was super easy because I said here are my constraints. I want to collaborate with my wife on this. I want to know things about the household, kind of scope it to the household. I'm not going to do finances with this, I'm not doing medical information. But when it would, when we're talking about sharing and working with me and my wife, I was like, I was imagining that like, okay, I'll have this with my computer, I can talk to Claude and it will know the stuff. But I also want my wife to talk to her Claude and have it know the same things. And so

16:29I've been trying out a couple different variations on this, and the first one was just purely Dropbox, where it was a Dropbox folder that we both had access to, copied on both our laptops, and so we could do it. And there was a little bit of like, it warned me that saying, well, maybe if you're both in there at the same time, you might have some Dropbox, same complex. And I said, well, what's the alternative? And it said, well, you could try, you could do like GitHub. If you're in that mindset of coding, you could like, commit markdown files into a GitHub repo and sync with that. My wife was like, I don't know if it's worth all that. There's some trade-offs for that still. Where we've landed actually is somewhere in the middle where I do like GitHub for some of the stuff. There's a few scripts like the linter and some of the other things that export to a wall display.

17:26But a lot of the stuff is handled with Dropbox. And we kind of just know that we're both not really in there at the same time reading and writing. Yeah. I mean, I do think this like sort of practical product constraint of like how real time is your collaboration. And if it's only lightly real time, you can probably deal with some conflicts. And so I also love that.

17:48Some of us, the more technically inclined, are trying to bring into our households. Like, what if you just did a pull request, honey? Like, what if you just did a pull request? That would be totally fine for us to manage the refrigerator. So I think that's really funny. This episode is brought to you by JIRA Product Discovery. With AI, a single PM can summarize research, draft a PRD, and build a working prototype.

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19:09that household board. How are you displaying using this information inside your house? So here's one view that I look at because I'm a math teacher and I really like graphs. But it's not like this is readable to the rest of my household. And so what I've been using for a little while is a product called Deckboard, which is kind of just a wall display. You can put information on there. You can put a lot of stuff that you want.

19:38And one of the things though is you can just put a custom web page in there. And I was toying with the idea of what can I extract out of my database and put it on the wall that might be useful so that I can kind of have that reference for me. You walk by it and it catches your eye. They're like, I do need to do that. I do need to fix the faucet. I do need to get the new ice machine. That's what I wanted to surface. I wanted to get it out of my laptop and available for.

20:07for everyone. So what I had Claude do is build a little script to scrape kind of the to-do items, scrape upcoming trips and scrape some other information and build a piece of the wall display that has just like top of mind things. You should keep this in your mind. Like what projects are you working on? What are the trips? A little like kind of suggestion of something to do today. Hey, it's only $12 if you want to re-cock the whole path. And then maybe some longer-term stuff that needs attention and just some stuff for my kids. I thought I'd put me in a section of recent wins just to say, good job. You did fix that. You found out what iPads were out of date with software. You fixed the water heater in one day. Great job, Dad.

21:03I really love this. When I was working at Optimizely, we had this huge wall that we stood in front of every Monday. It's called the Wall of Work. And we actually printed out, this was back in the day where we had to walk uphill both ways for our code, printed out every single epic that we were working on and we would move it on this physical board and then we had a wall of wins. And I like that you were bringing that...

21:30Very wonderful scrub master energy to to your household household management. Um Do you find that this like helps you get stuff done do it? Does it actually change your behavior? It does it does because when it has built a checklist for me Like the on the insurance all these next steps or open items, they are not like lost in my memory of like, oh, I should do that just like I should thought in my head. It's recorded somewhere and it's like, we'll come back. Every time I do something in it in any a chat, it might remind me was like, hey, actually you're overdue on something like it's going to remind me that you've been waiting since September 24th on this. And so it's really actually

22:21Has moved me forward on so many projects that I've actually kind of like run out of a pending fires And I was like, oh that's a new experience. I used to have a backlog and now I'm now I actually it's the balls and everyone else's court like I'm always sending the email and it's I'm waiting on them and That's been really nice. So give me just give me the list of you know, somebody's like lives in their house as an adult Give me a list of like your household tasks. You should just get your AI to think about. So I saw repairs. I saw like comparison shopping. What else? What's on the list? So people can be inspired. So here's what's in this to-do list. There's repairs. There's a little bit of like, yeah, insurance, financial, maybe like future planning, wills, guardianship trusts, retirement funds. Like if you want to consolidate your retirement, actually that's a huge headache that's alive.

23:16I've been working on. That's been helpful here too. I think also IT and device management, trip planning. Actually, what I recently, with the earthquake reminder day yesterday, I think it was, I was like, oh, let's actually go to Claude here and say, hey, do...

23:44I need to plan for earthquakes. And then, you know, it's a very loose question that you just start with that. And because it's empowered by all the context you have, so it might know that the foundation is such and such, it might know you're in a liquid faction alone, a location zone. And then I'm really confident of like, okay, let's start working here. So, oh, you should plan for earthquakes.

24:13Yeah, let's capture this as an idea. I'm going to start a new project. So one of the structures in this is there are project files, and those are going to be where we collect information and start checklists and check things off. And I really love to close a project file when I'm done with it. I love to say, all right, we finished that project. Put it in the wins column. Put it on the dashboard. I really love this. And what I'm seeing here, it looks like this is invoking a skill or a plugin to just follow your little process.

24:42I think it's picking up some structures from the cloud.markdown and saying, yeah, you should start by creating the project file. We're starting as an idea first. It hasn't been promoted to a full project. I do have the backlog ideas like earthquake radius or just anything I think of like, just put that in the idea file. Should I re-landscape? Should I do anything to repaint?

25:07is the paint peeling off. I like taking a picture of a circuit breaker with all the, like, scrawled electrician handwriting. And I have it on my backlog of, like, can I go through and actually check which circuits those are and log it here so that I can ask Claude instead of trying to decipher the handwriting every time? We're bearing the lead here. There are some really good workflows. I'm, like, looking around my house. I'm like, oh, my gosh, I should do...

25:35All of this, and you're giving me another idea, which I'm gonna try and then I'll report to you if it works. I'm just gonna do a video walkthrough of my house, talking about stuff, and then I'm gonna drop it to Claude or to ChadGBT. I'm gonna be like, what do I need to be thinking about in this house? You have the video, you have all this stuff. Genius. Genius. This is gonna be AI for the homeowner. It is gonna be the headline here.

26:02Scott, I want to zip to lightning round question, although the first question might not be so lightning because you and I have a shared interest, which is AI and kids and learning math. So tell me a little bit about what you think about as somebody who's trying to figure out the intersection of AI and math and kids, and what should we be thinking about as parents? I am a big fan of...

26:28student agency, you know, we're talking about agents a lot, right? And it's interesting in the contrast with this kind of project with what Muse or Instinct might do. There's some overlap, but there's not entirely some, not 100% overlap. And I think that's related to math education in a little bit. So give me some rope here. It's like, if you're asking Muse, I know you've used Muse a little bit. Muse is the one out there maybe doing stuff for you.

26:57In this model, I've kept that role for myself a little bit. I want to know what you're going to suggest and recommend, but I'm going to be the one having some agency still. I think especially for students who are learning mathematics, we want to keep them doing the cognitive effort and keep them doing that agency, deciding what they want to know and struggling in a productive struggle to get there.

27:25We got to find a role for AI that supports that instead of kind of short circuits and gives them the answer or is too helpful or kind of maybe even doesn't appreciate the ideas that the student is giving.

27:43Really, I really like some of the products I see out there that are interpreting what the students say and running with that. It's like, oh, good idea, kid. Tell me more about that. So what you're saying is important is, one, you personally like to be human in a loop. I don't like to be human. That's not for me. I like the agent to be in the loop. So I'm very heavy.

28:05grok bot go muse go but you're saying like I want the AI to put me to work and that's what works well for my brain and how I like to be in the loop and from a AI education perspective you like you know solutions where it can support interpretation of what a student is doing but not take away that agency of like I am learning how to solve this problem I am learning how to how to do the work.

28:34Can you show me an example of what you mean? Yeah I think like I've seen some projects I've kind of noodled on projects myself where you kind of flip the relationship of a chatbot tutor where the tutor is now the chatbot is not aiming to teach the student but the chatbot is aiming to extract some teachings from the student and so the chatbot might say help me understand how to solve a linear equation and And the student might say, oh, well, I kind of know what you should do is maybe subtract things from both sides. And the chatbot's like, ah, but why do you have to do that? And can the chatbot be positioned so that they are not annoying? But they can still grab the ideas that the student has. And the students have a lot of great knowledge in their heads. But sometimes they're afraid to share it out with humans and share it out with AI. So I think.

29:29It's going to be powerful if we can enable kids to share their thoughts. Today, this is my second episode I've recorded today, and the earlier one was also about a language tutoring episode. So it might already be live. But what we were talking about in that one is AI, is this like infinitely patient private tutor? You can say all your dumbest stuff too. And so it's like never going to be, that's a stupid question, or you should know that already. It can always.

29:57kind of like help you privately go through your growth mindset go through the like what what do I call my kids the zone of frustration where it's like if you're frustrated you're learning and you can go through that zone of frustration with this sort of like private patient foil for your learning and I think that's really powerful and I tell people this all the time about coding but it applies to any sort of learning activity. Yeah I think actually the zone of frustration or zone of proximal development. I think like, you know, Canada tutor, you also mentioned infinite patients. And I think that's something that is interesting to play with in the chatbot realm of like, should it be infinitely patient or should it also kind of, you know, politely but also

30:50Be a polite demander a warm demander of saying like you actually I think you do know this so I can't quite Do all the work for you. I need to let you yeah You can do it Yeah, I can I can super encouraging Yeah, and and say what I know you already know and and point you in the way to unleash your own knowledge I I love it. What a great what a great freebie. Okay my last question we ask everybody when AI is not doing what you want, when it's being frustrating, when it cannot close that idea file, how do you prompt it? This is a good question to ask parents and teachers. My honest answer is I kind of closed that chapter. I was like, I just started a new session maybe and so you're like, we must have gotten somewhere out of sync somehow.

31:47Sometimes I ask it of like, why would you think that? How did you get that idea? Because actually in this context of working with the memory file so directly, I want to be sure that it's not like it hasn't written it somewhere in there. One example is some in an earlier version of the to-do file, it's just started writing all the updates in the to-do table and then the to-do was just massively.

32:13a lot of information. And I was like, didn't I put in the cloud instructions that it should be short and brief and not have the updates? And then it comes back in a very positive voice of like, you did tell me that. I'm sorry. You ask a different why. Like, why did you do that? I ask, why are you like this?

32:37Or I just do a straight up Y with seven Ys. Again, I think there is just like personality differences that go, is that what we, how we work with our AI. This has been super fun. AI, put a bunch of context in there, put a bunch of loose context in there, figure, let AI figure it out. Use AI to keep you on track with managing your household responsibilities. Give yourself a pile of wins.

33:06And then when it comes to learning with AI, don't let it just give you the answer. Let it push you, but also pull out from you what you already know. Great episode, Scott. I really appreciate this. Where can we find you and how can we be helpful? I am at sfxmath.com. You can see kind of what I work on there. You can find me on LinkedIn, Scott Ford.

33:34And yeah, I'm always eager to talk about math education. Amazing. Well, I am too. We're going to stop the recording and we'll go there. Thank you so much for joining How I AI. Thank you. Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed the show, please like and subscribe here on YouTube, or even better, leave us a comment with your thoughts. You can also find this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app.

34:00Please consider leaving us a rating and review which will help others find the show. You can see all our episodes and learn more about the show at howiaipod.com. See you next time.