Claude Code + Obsidian: What Happens After the Notes Pile Up

The internet is buzzing about Claude Code + Obsidian. But there's a blind spot nobody's addressing.

A recent thread on X asked how people use Claude Code with Obsidian. The responses were fascinating—not for what they said, but for what they revealed.

What People Are Doing

Here's a sample of how developers are combining these tools:

"Doing trip planning and research for Europe. Claude is generating todo lists and checklists for prep, city/activity research. Sometimes, I'll just point Claude to the folder and ask what I need to think about or decide next."

"I often ask Claude Code to write out design docs, and then sync that over to my Obsidian vault to read."

"I use it for my todos—I write my notes, meeting notes and various other notes—and then get Claude to construct a weekly note for me with all my tasks."

"Vibe-thinking with Obsidian canvas. I dump my ideas into the AI agent and it syncs the canvas accordingly. I can see my thoughts in a few seconds."

"No Obsidian. Just plain Claude Code with a skill to add new entries. Let the agent organize the notes."

The pattern is clear: AI is generating content at unprecedented speed. Design docs, research notes, todo lists, meeting summaries—all flowing into vaults and folders.

The Blind Spot

Notice what's missing from every single response?

Nobody is talking about reading.

The entire conversation is about generation and organization. How to create more notes faster. How to structure them better. How to let AI do the heavy lifting of writing.

But here's the uncomfortable question: what happens to all those notes after they're created?

One user admitted the quiet part out loud:

"I have *tons* of bookmarks (sites, tweets, posts), but I can't seem to find the time to make sense of them. I want to put that library to use."

Another was even more direct:

"I started with Obsidian but found it redundant and tedious. Not worth the effort."

The Math Problem

Let's do some quick math.

Claude can generate 2,000-4,000 words in a single response. A typical power user might run 10-20 meaningful conversations per day. That's potentially 40,000-80,000 words of AI-generated content daily.

Average reading speed is about 250 words per minute. To read everything Claude generates in a single day would take 2.5-5 hours of focused reading.

Nobody has that time. So what happens?

• Notes pile up unread
• Valuable insights get buried
• The same questions get asked again
• The "second brain" becomes a graveyard

Why Obsidian Doesn't Solve This

Obsidian is an incredible tool for knowledge management. Backlinks, graph view, plugins, templates—it's built for people who think in interconnected notes.

But it's built on an assumption that's increasingly outdated: that you are the primary author of your notes.

When you write something yourself, you already know what's in it. You don't need to track whether you've read it. The act of writing is the act of processing.

AI changes this equation. Now you have content you technically "created" but haven't actually consumed. The design doc Claude wrote. The research summary you exported. The meeting notes AI generated from a transcript.

These aren't your thoughts—they're documents waiting to be read. And Obsidian has no system for that.

What's Actually Needed

Think about email. We figured out decades ago that an inbox requires a system:

• Unread vs. read — Know what you haven't processed
• Star/flag — Surface important items
• Archive — Clear what's done without deleting
• Inbox Zero — A clear endpoint to work toward

Why don't we have this for documents?

Because historically, we didn't need it. Documents were expensive to create. The bottleneck was writing, not reading.

AI inverted this. Now creation is cheap and consumption is the constraint. But our tools haven't caught up.

The Missing Piece

That's why we built Markdown Inbox. Not as a replacement for Obsidian—but as the reading layer that's missing from every AI workflow.

• Point it at any folder (including your Obsidian vault)
• See what's unread, what's in progress, what's done
• Pick up where you left off in long documents
• Star important items, archive what's processed
• Actually hit zero

You can keep using Claude Code to generate. Keep using Obsidian to organize. But add a system for the part everyone's ignoring: actually reading what you've created.

The Future Is Consumption

The Claude Code + Obsidian conversation is a glimpse of what's coming. AI is going to generate more content, faster, in more contexts. The people who build systems for consuming that content will extract the value. Everyone else will drown in their own notes.

The question isn't how to generate more. It's how to read what you've already generated.

Nobody in that Twitter thread was asking that question. But it's the only one that matters.