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I’ve been trying to organize my brain for over a decade.
I signed up for Roam Research the first week it launched. I’ve used Notion, Evernote, Apple Notes, Google Keep, scattered Google Docs across five accounts. I have notes from seven companies I’ve started. Journal entries going back to 2014. Book highlights. Meeting transcripts. Strategy docs. AI conversations. All of it scattered — some in Obsidian, some in Google Drive, some on my desktop in folders I named things like “IMPORTANT” and “Sort Later.”
I feel like I’ve lived five lives. And no system I tried could keep up.
I always knew the answer was to connect everything. I could see it in my head — all the threads, all the patterns. But I never had the time to actually build the system. There was always a pitch to prep, a client to call, a fire to put out.
Then I spent a week with Claude Code and did what I’d been wanting to do for years.
5,000 notes. 12 years of journals. Two books in progress. A startup to raise for. Thousands of contacts. All connected, all compressed, all navigable. And the AI doesn’t just search it — it knows me. It knows my startup, my emotional patterns, my team, my writing voice, what I decided last week and what’s still unresolved. The difference in output quality is unreal.
After I built mine, a friend sent me a post by Andrej Karpathy, the guy who built Tesla’s autopilot AI and co-founded OpenAI, describing almost the same approach. Raw data compiled into wikis, operated on by AI, all in Obsidian. It was exciting to see I was headed in the right direction.
Here’s how I did it.
The problem: not just memory, but burn
Before this weekend sprint, I didn’t have a vault. I had notes in Roam Research. Notes in Google Docs. Notes in Apple Notes. PDFs and markdown files uploaded to Claude Projects. Strategy decks in Google Drive. Journal entries in one app, meeting notes in another, investor research in a third.
Every time I opened an AI tool, I started from zero. “I’m Adelaida, I run Onde, we’re raising $600k, my Co-Founder Sergio just joined, we have Accenture as a client...” Fifteen minutes of context-setting before any actual work. And even with Claude Projects where I’d uploaded files, I was burning through usage just getting it to find things.
The problem wasn’t just that AI had no memory. It was that every workaround I tried — uploading files, re-explaining context, copying and pasting between tools — was slower and more expensive than just doing the work myself.
What changed everything wasn’t giving AI more files. It was giving it a connected system. When your notes link to each other, when concepts reference people who reference meetings who reference decisions, the AI doesn’t have to read everything. It follows the links. It finds what it needs in seconds instead of scanning hundreds of files. The context is richer, the answers are more accurate, and you stop burning tokens on “let me search for that.”
That’s the difference between a folder of files and a knowledge graph. One is storage. The other is navigation.
The architecture: three layers of memory
The breakthrough wasn’t better organization. It was compression. I stopped thinking of my vault as one flat archive and started thinking of it as three layers:
Layer 1: Operating context (5 notes, read every session). These answer: who am I, what am I working on, what happened last, what’s unresolved. Start Here, Current Priorities, Open Loops, Last Session, and CLAUDE.md (the memory file). With these five files, Claude goes from blank slate to fully oriented in under 10 seconds.
Layer 2: Domain summaries (7 notes, read when relevant). Each major area of my life has one compressed summary: my startup, my writing, my home, my psychology notes, my school vision, my book notes, my business ideas. 200-400 words each. I also have 28 monthly journal summaries that compress 2,325 entries into one note per month. If I ask “what was I going through last October?”, the AI reads one note instead of twenty.
Layer 3: Deep archive (5,000 notes, read only when needed). Journals, AI chats, meeting transcripts, book notes, historical material. Stays large. Stays untouched. Only gets opened when a specific question requires it.
The optimization isn’t at the archive level. It’s at the summary level. Compress first, search second
Claude code prompt:
You can install the ai-brain-starter from https://myceliumai.co/install
The memory file: teaching AI who you are
The single highest-value thing I did was create a CLAUDE.md file at the root of my vault. This file loads automatically every session. It contains who I am, what I’m working on, my vault structure, key terms, people, rules for how the AI should behave, tool routing, and efficiency rules.
This alone changed everything. Claude stopped being a smart stranger and started being a colleague who was in the room yesterday.
The accountability rules
This might be my favorite part of the whole system.
By default, AI is a yes-machine. It agrees with you, validates you, avoids friction. That’s useful for autocomplete. It’s terrible for thinking.
So I added 15 rules to my memory file:
Correct me if I’m wrong.
Stop me if I’m gossiping.
Check me when I’m stubborn.
Tell me the truth even when it hurts.
Tell me when I’m self-sabotaging.
Call me out when I’m making excuses.
Remind me who I said I wanted to be.
Don’t let me settle just because it’s easier.
Check my ego every time.
Tell me when I’m overthinking everything.
Call me out if I’m playing the victim.
Don’t let me stay comfortable if it’s keeping me stuck.
Tell me when I’m the problem.
Call me out when I’m avoiding what I need to face.
Tell me when I’m out of alignment with my values.
The moment I added these, every conversation changed. Claude started pushing back on my self talk that was off. It told me when I was avoiding a hard conversation with a team member. It reminded me of a decision I’d made the week before that I was about to contradict.
AI is useless when it’s nice. It’s useful when it’s honest.
Delegation: AI managing other AIs
Here’s what most people miss: your AI assistant should delegate too.
I have paid accounts in Perplexity, Manus AI, Gemini Pro, Granola, n8n, PostHog, Linear, HubSpot, Framer, and more. Each is better than Claude at something specific. So I built a routing table into my memory file. (got most of these pro subscriptions through one subscription Lenny’s Newsletter)
When I ask Claude to research 30 angel investors, it tells me: “This is a Manus task.” Then it writes a structured task brief. I send the brief to Manus. Manus does the research autonomously. I paste the result back. Claude cleans it up and integrates it into my vault.
In one session, I had Manus running four tasks in parallel: CRM standardization across 243 contacts, monthly journal summaries for 2 years, domain summaries for 7 life areas, and a graph cleanup audit. Meanwhile, Claude was doing the work that needed judgment — fixing data quality issues, adding wikilinks, building dashboards.
Your main AI is the orchestrator. Your other tools are the workers. Route the right work to the right tool.
Automation: the vault fills itself
I set up a script that pulls meeting notes from Granola and auto-saves them to my vault as properly formatted Obsidian notes with frontmatter, attendee lists, and transcripts. It runs twice a day. I never manually import a meeting note again.
Anything that happens regularly should happen automatically. Meeting notes, journal prompts, decision logs. The vault should fill itself.
CRM that actually works
I had hundreds of contact files with inconsistent metadata. No way to query “show me all active investors” or “who needs follow-up.”
I ran a standardization pass: a script that added structured fields (relationship, status, priority, last interaction) to every contact. Then a correction pass to fix the mistakes. Now I have working Dataview dashboards for active contacts, investors needing follow-up, and monthly summaries with emotional tracking.
The vault went from a filing cabinet to a queryable database.
The graph: pruning matters more than planting
My vault had 1,846 unresolved links, 7,000+ orphan files, and 4,600+ dead ends. The graph was noisy.
The fix wasn’t adding more notes. It was fixing malformed links, adding aliases, creating the 10 genuinely missing concept notes, adding outbound links to dead ends, and deleting 1,400 junk files (including a node_modules folder that somehow ended up in the vault).
The graph is a map. A noisy map is worse than no map.
The daily journal
This one came from an insight I didn’t expect.
After Claude analyzed all 2,325 journal entries, it told me something I’d never noticed: when I have gaps between journaling, it usually means I’m having a good stretch. Life is flowing, I’m busy, things are working. But it also means I process the hard stuff in detail and barely log the good stuff. Twelve years of data on my worst days. Almost nothing on my best ones.
So we built a journal skill specifically to fix that. I type /journal, Claude asks me about my day, follows the thread when something interesting comes up, and pushes when I try to stay surface-level. If I say “good day,” it doesn’t let me off the hook: “What specifically made it good? I want to capture this one.” If I’m clearly avoiding something, it says so.
Then it saves the entry in my voice. First person, stream of consciousness, messy and real — the way I actually write in my journals, not the way AI writes.
That’s the pattern I keep seeing: Claude surfaces an insight from my data, and then we build a skill to act on it. The journaling gap led to the journal skill. The realization that I carry people too long led to accountability check-ins. The discovery that my gym streaks correlate with my most productive weeks led to tracking it in every entry. The system doesn’t just store information — it generates insights that change behavior, and then those changes get built into the system.
Each journal entry also gets reviewed by an advisory panel — 60+ thinkers I selected across wealth, psychology, relationships, health, creativity, and strategy. Names like Naval Ravikant, Brene Brown, Esther Perel, Peter Attia, Rick Rubin, Marcus Aurelius. Based on what came up in the conversation, Claude picks the 3-5 most relevant voices and gives me their perspective in 1-2 sentences each. It’s not a gimmick. It actually feels like getting pushback and ideas from people who think very differently than I do. One night the panel caught me romanticizing a pattern I’d repeated three times before. Another night it connected a money anxiety to a relationship dynamic I hadn’t seen.
I’ve been journaling for 12 years. I’ve never been as consistent as I am now. Because it doesn’t feel like homework. It feels like a conversation with a friend who knows me and a panel of mentors who challenge me.
You don’t need 12 years of journals to start. You need one entry. The system compounds from there.
The surprise: insights I never asked for
Once the vault was connected, I asked Claude a question I hadn’t planned: “Now that you know every area of my life, what questions have I not asked that I should be asking?”
What came back blew my mind.
Claude had mapped my entire emotional life by floor — using the High-Rise framework from my book — cross-referenced with whether I slept well, whether I worked out, who I was with, and what I was working on. It told me which people consistently drain me and which ones correlate with my highest floors. It showed me that this year I’ve written more than twice as much from the higher floors than in any previous year. It identified my happiest days and what they had in common. It flagged patterns in my relationships that I’d been living inside for years without seeing.
It told me my sister is the most stable high-floor presence in 12 years of journals. I sent her that. She deserved to know.
These aren’t things I asked for. They’re things the system surfaced because it could see across 5,000 notes at once. No human could read 2,325 journal entries and cross-reference them with my CRM, my calendar, and my sleep patterns. Claude can. And when every note links to every other note, the insights aren’t just summaries. They’re connections I couldn’t make myself.
The team vault
I also built a separate vault for my startup team — synced through Google Drive so everyone accesses the same files. It has its own CLAUDE.md, its own dashboards, its own CRM entries. When anyone on the team opens Claude in that vault, they get the same context: who our clients are, where the raise stands, what happened in the last meeting, what the priorities are.
But I still work from my personal vault. Because it knows how my brain works — not just the company, but my writing, my journals, my patterns, everything. It can make connections across all of it, so even when I'm thinking through a business problem, the extra context makes the thinking better in ways I didn't expect. The team vault syncs Onde-related files from mine automatically. I get the full picture. They get what they need.
How I actually use it
I almost never open the Obsidian folders directly. I don’t click through sidebar trees looking for files. I do almost everything through Claude Code — the desktop app. I just talk to it.
“What did we decide about pricing last week?” Claude finds the decision log entry.
“Draft an email to the Accenture contact.” Claude pulls context from the CRM and the last meeting note.
“What’s my investor pipeline looking like?” Claude queries the Dataview dashboard.
The vault is the brain. Claude is the interface. I rarely touch the files myself — I just talk, and the system responds with full context.
What changed
Before: 15 minutes of context-setting every session. Strategy docs buried in Google Drive. 5,000 files at one flat depth. One tool for everything. Meetings, decisions, and insights lost in conversation.
After: AI orients itself in 10 seconds. Every domain has a summary. Manus handles research, Claude handles judgment, scripts handle bulk. Meetings auto-import, decisions auto-log. The vault fills itself and gets smarter over time.
And the most important change: I went from organizing as procrastination to organizing as infrastructure. The vault isn’t a project I maintain — it’s the foundation everything else runs on.
Set up yours in an afternoon (free)
I open-sourced the whole system.
You can install the ai-brain-starter skill from https://myceliumai.co/install
Claude will interview you about your life and build everything from your answers. The memory file, the folder structure, the context layer, the CRM, the journal routine, the accountability rules, the power tools. All of it.
What took me a week of figuring things out, making every mistake, and optimizing until it ran smoothly — you can have running in one conversation. The CRM standardization that took me a full day? Claude does it in 30 minutes now. The monthly journal summaries from 2,325 entries? Batched and automated. The graph cleanup, the domain summaries, the dashboards — all built into /optimize-brain so you skip the trial and error.
You don’t need to be technical. You don’t need to read a guide. You paste one line, have a conversation, and by the end Claude knows who you are.
What the repo doesn’t do
The skill builds the architecture. It can’t do the interior design. That part is specific to your life, your patterns, your mess.
I ran Claude on 12 years of my journals and it pulled out 10 questions my therapist, business coach, and best friend would all ask. That took thousands of entries processed with judgment. The skill can’t replicate that.
I built a panel of 60+ thinkers (Naval, Brene Brown, Esther Perel, Peter Attia, Rick Rubin, more) that Claude consults daily based on what comes up in my journal. That needs to be calibrated to your world, not mine.
I trained Claude to write in my voice by feeding it my actual writing. I built a shared vault for my startup team with 128 files and live dashboards. I connected my vault to HubSpot, email, calendar, meeting notes auto-import, investor pipeline tracking. That’s where a personal vault becomes a business operating system.
The repo gives you the architecture. The call gives you the interior design.
The meta-lesson
The tools don’t matter as much as the architecture. Obsidian is just markdown files. Claude is just a language model. Manus is just a research agent.
What matters is how they talk to each other. The memory file is the bridge. The summaries are the compression layer. The routing table is the traffic system. Build the architecture once. Then everything you do compounds.
No one can sell you a second brain. They can only give you the tools to build one.
Install it. Use it. Make it yours. If you build something cool with it, tell me.
You can install the ai-brain-starter skill from https://myceliumai.co/install
I write about consciousness, AI, and building a life that makes sense at Regard on Substack.
Founding members ($240/yr) get a 1-hour call. We build your vault live, run the deep optimization together, set up your team vault, or talk about whatever matters most. The repo gives you the architecture. The call gives you the interior design.
I’m Adelaida. I run Onde, I write about consciousness and AI, and I built all of this with Claude Code and too much coffee in Bogota.
