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Hello there. My name is Greg and today I want to talk to you about how you can use Claude Desktop plus MCP servers plus Obsidian to get some pretty astonishing results with not very much effort. Let's start with some definitions. What is Claude Desktop? Claude Desktop is the app version of Claude. You can install it on your machine and run it as an app versus the web version. Why would you want to do that? Why don't you just use the web version? Well, in our case, primarily because the uh desktop version of Claude can act as an MCP client, which means that it can interact with MCP servers, and you cannot do this yet uh via the web version. So, what is an MCP server? Uh MCP or model context protocol is an open protocol that was developed by anthropic and it is a standardized way to bring context to your models. Uh this context will often take the form of knowledge say interacting with a database or tools which would be functions programmatic functions that your model can decide to invoke. Uh and one of the simplest uh MCP servers was the file system one. And so the file system one equips your model with a set of tools that will allow it to list all the files in a directory, read those files, write to those files, create new files, etc. This pairs really nicely with Obsidian. Obsidian is an incredibly popular note-taking app. And Obsidian uh basically sits on top of what it calls a vault. A vault is effectively a directory full of markdown files. Uh and so if you take the cloud desktop app, you give it access to the file system via an MCP server, it can now read and edit your Obsidian notes. Let's look at an example of what you can do with this setup. Last week I spoke at the business of software conference in the UK and gave a talk about AI and afterwards my friend Dave Collins from the conference asked if I would do uh an interview over email for his blog and newsletter and I said sure and he sent me a list of 10 questions to sort of answer at my leisure uh that were related to my talk. Um these 10 questions is the sort of thing that I would naturally procrastinate. Uh, so I instead just said, "Hey, I wonder if I can use this new setup to knock this out in an hour or two." Uh, so what I did is I created a new Obsidian note and I copy and pasted Dave's questions into there. Then I went into Claude and I asked, "Hey, do you have access to this note?" And I said, "Yes, indeed, I can see the note." And I said, "Okay, ask me each question one at a time." And so now it was like I was being interviewed by Claude as opposed to being faced with all the questions at once. Now, instead of typing my responses into the chat box, I used Super Whisper to dictate my responses. And this was nice because I could ramble a little bit, but I wasn't getting caught in the typical writing trap of editing while I was writing. I just spoke my reply and then after each reply, I asked Claude to update the original document with my response to the question. And it did this pretty much flawlessly. I did have some issues with Super Whisper. uh it was a little bit finicky and I had to turn on the uh simulate key press uh for it to input the text into the clawed text box. And I'm not sure what was going on there, but it took a little bit of uh of poking and proddding, but I was able to get Super Whisper to work here. So, after that pass, it went through and it asked me the 10 questions and now I had responses. I then asked Claude to take a pass over all of my responses and to just clean them up. So, I said, "Hey, I'm likely to repeat myself when I speak. Uh, can you please uh edit these for brevity and succinctness? Make sure I'm only expressing an idea once per response, but please keep everything as close to my words as possible. Uh, I also asked it to please uh put its edits into a new document. I was afraid here that if something went wrong, I would lose all my original responses and it wouldn't be impossible to retrieve them, but it would be tricky." Uh, this did though make me think of a bit of a tangent for a future experiment. I do wonder if you could uh equip Claude with the Git MCP server, uh, which would allow it then to make commits. And I'd have to look into this, but I imagine that Git plus Obsidian, it would be a pretty powerful combination to have version control for all of your notes. Marking that for a future project. Uh, it was able to create a new file, no problem. Uh, it cleaned up my responses. uh did a pretty good job. Uh still wasn't exactly where I wanted it. So now I went into Obsidian and I finally, you know, sort of for the first time took the keys and did a good old-fashioned editing pass, uh and cleaned up the text, um you know, removed the bits that I didn't like, added some bits that I thought of afterwards. Um, but this editing process is so much easier than writing. And saving the editing for after I've already done the writing and already had Claude take a first pass and clean up my dictations saved me so much time. Uh, in the end, I ended up writing about 2,000 words uh, and probably about 90 minutes uh, and sent these off to Dave that morning before lunchtime. And it felt great. Like it felt great to knock out this project. And I can easily say that I would not have gotten this done as quickly if it had not been for this Claude plus MCP server plus Obsidian setup.