Chat context is ephemeral. A vault isn’t.
Unlike chat memory, an Obsidian vault is persistent, portable, versioned and yours — usable across machines and clients. The vault is the memory; Claude is the thinking and writing layer. Three functions keep the system alive: search the vault before any task (read), persist findings as atomic notes (write), and audit orphans and dead links regularly (maintain).
Two paths, one vault
- Claude Desktop has no native filesystem access → the bridge is a local MCP server (stdio), configured in
claude_desktop_config.json. - Claude Code reads and writes the vault natively as a directory. It’s steered through
CLAUDE.mdplus skills in.claude/skills/, versioned via Git.
Run both in parallel — the same Git vault — and you get one brain with two entrances: Code for autonomous maintenance and team discipline, Desktop as a comfortable reading front end.
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