Introduction

Imagine having a personal wiki that writes and maintains itself — with help from Claude. This guide shows you how to build an AI-powered knowledge base using two tools:

• Obsidian — a powerful note-taking app that stores your notes as plain markdown files
• Claude Code — an AI assistant that can read, write, and organize your files

The core principle is simple: you never write the wiki yourself — Claude writes and maintains it for you. You just drop in source documents, and Claude transforms them into connected, searchable notes.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, make sure you have:

• Claude Code CLI — Install by following the official guide
• Obsidian — Download from obsidian.md
• Terminal — macOS Terminal or Windows Terminal

Step 1: Set Up Obsidian

Create a new vault where your wiki will live:

1. Open Obsidian
2. Click Create New Vault
3. Give it a name like my-wiki
4. Choose a location on your computer
5. Keep the defaults and click Create

Your vault is now a folder on your computer. You can open this folder in your terminal to work with Claude.

Step 2: Create the Folder Structure

You'll create two main folders inside your vault:

• raw/ — for source documents you want to ingest
• wiki/ — for Claude-generated wiki pages

Summary

Here's the core workflow:

• Add sources → drop documents into raw/
• Claude processes → reads docs, creates wiki pages, adds links
• Query anytime → ask Claude questions about your knowledge
• Maintain regularly → run link audits and updates