Set it up so nothing
you do is ever lost.

The whole setup, start to finish. Watch the walkthrough, or follow the written build below.

1. 01Download Obsidian at obsidian.md. It is free, on Windows, Mac, and phone.
2. 02Open it and create a vault. A vault is just a folder you pick. Your notes live there as plain text files that you own. Nothing is locked in someone else's cloud.
3. 03That folder is the foundation. Everything else points at it.

That is the whole start. You now have a place to keep your work that you control.

This is what turns a notes folder into a system.

1. 01Install Claude Code at claude.com/claude-code.
2. 02Point it at your vault folder (open that folder in your terminal and run claude).
3. 03In the folder, create a file named CLAUDE.md. This is the rulebook your AI reads before it does anything, every time.

# How to work with me

## At the start of every session
- Read today's daily note. If it does not exist, create it.
- Tell me briefly where we left off.

## While we work
- When we make a decision, write it down in the right note.
- When we solve a problem, capture how.

## At the end
- Write a short log of what we did and what is next.

Now capturing your work is the default. The AI does it because the rulebook tells it to, not because you remembered.

These are the deliberate captures you trigger. In Claude Code you set them up as simple reusable prompts (slash commands). Three carry the whole load.

Read back over this whole conversation. Pull out the decisions we made,
the things we figured out, and any next steps. Write them as a dated note
in my vault, filed by topic, and link it from today's daily note.

1. 01Make your vault a git repository and push it to a private GitHub repo. Git is a backup with a memory: it keeps every version, so you can rewind to any point in time.
2. 02Optional but worth it: a small scheduled job that commits and pushes every 15 minutes, so you never think about it.

cd /path/to/your/vault
git add -A
git commit -m "auto: $(date)" || exit 0
git pull --no-edit
git push

Schedule it every 15 minutes (Task Scheduler on Windows, cron on Mac). Keep the repo private. Never commit secrets (see the security note at the end).

This is the part people think is hard. It is not.

A notes app finds the exact word you type. This finds the meaning across all your notes and answers in plain English, with the source. It is your own private search engine over everything you have written. The everyday command for it is /lightrag-query: before you decide anything twice, you ask what you already decided.

1. 01Install Docker Desktop.
2. 02Run LightRAG (open-source) in a container, bound to your own machine only (localhost). One command and it is up, and it never leaves your computer.
3. 03Give it a model provider for the answers and the search math (for example an OpenAI key for embeddings and answers, and optionally a reranker). Put your keys in its config file, not in your notes.
4. 04Point it at your vault folder so it reads your notes, and let it build its map.
5. 05Ask it questions. It finds the closest ideas by meaning, ranks them, and writes the answer with the note it came from.

Keep it on localhost. Your whole history becomes searchable and it stays private.

Set two scheduled jobs and forget them:

1. 01Every 15 minutes: commit and push your vault to GitHub (Part 4).
2. 02Every few hours: feed any new or changed notes into LightRAG and re-index, so your search engine is always current.

Now the system captures, backs up, and re-indexes on its own, whether you are at the desk or not.

Put your vault folder in a synced location (OneDrive, Dropbox, or iCloud Drive) and rely on git as the second layer. One layer copies your files between machines almost instantly. Git keeps the versions straight on top of it. Close your laptop, open your desktop, and it is the same brain: same notes, same memory, same history.

A rulebook that writes as you work. A vault you own. Commands that file everything. GitHub backing it up every fifteen minutes with full history. A private search engine over your entire past. Automation running it hands-off. On every machine you touch. It is not one save button. It is a failsafe, layer on layer, so no work you do ever gets lost.