llearn

The lazy 2nd Brain Starter

For starters, these “2nd brains” are really just LLM Wiki’s. The concept of an LLM Wiki was first thought of by a guy called Andrew Karpathy. He’s the guy that progressed LLM’s from a fancier version of auto-complete to the first generation of ChatGPT

See Karpathy’s GitHub repo

TL;DR - Curating information is tiresome, but with AI able to read files, you can basically employ it as the librarian, researcher, and teacher of your own knowledgebase. Think an automated Wikipedia filled with the content you want and maintained by AI.

What you need

Obsidian

This is just a fancy way to view files/folders and is how people generate those fancy looking graphs of their “2nd brains”.

An LLM(claude |codex )

This is completely up to you. I recommend Claude Code or Codex because they’re easy to use and, with subscriptions at $20 USD/month, you can start straight away.

Note: Obsidian works with markdown (.md) files, which are basically just text files. It’s a perfect halfway format for you and your LLM to collaborate on.

Start your vault

Once you have Obsidian installed and have your LLM open and signed in, you’re good to go.

It’s common not to fully understand what you now have, but that’s fine. Ask your LLM to teach you.

Here’s the lazy part: Upgrade the setup

Here is a prompt you can give your LLM to get like 80% of the learnings I’ve gained from building this project. Again, you might not know what’s happening, and that’s fine—just ask your AI to teach you what’s going on.

I have the basic setup of an LLM Wiki with Obsidian downloaded and you as my choice of LLM. I want to upgrade the setup a little bit by adding the PARA folder structure and I also want to download 4 tools:

1. QMD - https://github.com/tobi/qmd
2. Headroom - https://github.com/headroomlabs-ai/headroom
3. Context-Mode - https://github.com/mksglu/context-mode
4. Graphify - https://github.com/Graphify-Labs/graphify

Once you’ve installed all of those as plugins and are available for you to use, please run graphify for my current obsidian vault and guide me through to viewing the graph in obsidian.

If I don’t have a lot of documents then can you make a couple of documents on this “upgraded setup” process that are written in plain English for a non technical person and then run graphify and continue with guiding me through to seeing the graph

Once all of this is done, finish off with a nice high level summary of what’s happened and the provide some starter ideas to populate the vault with the last option asking if the user has any work they want to start on with you