How to build your own AI chief of staff using Obsidian, Claude Code, and a handful of free tools. No coding experience required — just follow the steps.
I'm not a developer. I'm an executive coach. Everything you see here was built through conversation with Claude — describing what I wanted in plain English and letting it write the code.
Backstory
I heard Noah Brier on a podcast talking about using Claude Code with Obsidian. He'd built an open source starter kit called Claudesidian — a pre-configured vault template designed to be driven by AI. That was the spark.
I started with Noah's template and quickly realized this could be something much bigger. Not just a note-taking setup, but a full personal operating system — one that manages my coaching business, tracks my finances, processes my emails, and runs my daily ceremonies. All through conversation with Claude.
Pepper Potts is what emerged. I'm still building it — a little each week, always in service of the actual work, not as a project for its own sake. This guide is everything you need to build your own version.
My vision for Pepper Potts
I want an intelligence layer that wraps around every domain of my life — coaching, finances, health, relationships, creativity, logistics — and orchestrates them the way a world-class chief of staff would. Structure that feels like liberation, not control.
The morning kickoff already shapes my day. The evening reflection captures what happened. The weekly review closes open loops. Email forwarding means important messages land in my vault without me lifting a finger. And it's all connected — coaching actions, financial data, project status — surfaced exactly when I need it.
Eventually, I want health data flowing in (HRV, sleep), calendar integration for time-aware decisions, pattern detection that notices recurring themes across weeks of notes, and client prep briefs generated automatically before every coaching session.
The coaching clients will eventually ask: “How do you stay so organized?” And I'll say: “Let me show you.” That is the product.
How I actually use this
I open my laptop in the morning, fire up the terminal, and type /daily-kickoff. Claude reads my daily note, checks my coaching actions, pulls in any forwarded emails that arrived overnight, and asks me: “What are your three wins for today?” We have a quick conversation and I'm locked in for the day in about five minutes.
During the day, I forward emails I want to keep straight to my vault — receipts, referrals, important threads. They appear as markdown notes automatically. When I need to research something, I ask Claude and it searches across my entire vault — hundreds of notes, meeting transcripts, project docs — and synthesizes what it finds.
Between coaching calls, I have buffer blocks — 30-minute windows for knocking off small tasks. I ask Claude “what's in my buffer?” and it pulls up the running list. I pick a few things, knock them out, move on.
In the evening, I run /daily-reflection. Claude walks me through what I actually did versus what I intended, captures the key insights, and plants a seed for tomorrow. It's a five-minute conversation that replaces what used to be fifteen minutes of scattered journaling.
On Sundays, /weekly-review closes the week — what went well, what didn't, what's carrying forward. It processes the inbox, archives completed projects, and sets up the week ahead.
The magic isn't any one feature. It's that everything talks to everything. My coaching actions show up in my morning kickoff. My forwarded emails land in the right place. My weekly review catches things I would have dropped. The system holds what my brain can't.
Current features
Daily Ceremonies
/daily-kickoff/daily-reflection/weekly-review/wrap-upThinking & Research
/thinking-partner/research-assistant/inbox-processor/process-conversationsAutomations
Utilities
/de-ai-ify/add-frontmatter/download-attachment/pragmatic-reviewKnowledge Skills (auto-triggered)
What is Pepper Potts?
A personal operating system built on top of Obsidian (a free note-taking app) and Claude Code (Anthropic's AI coding assistant). It turns your notes into a living system that helps you organize your life, run your business, and stay on top of everything.
Think of it like hiring a chief of staff who lives inside your computer. Every morning it reviews your day. Every evening it reflects on what happened. It processes your emails, tracks your projects, and connects the dots across everything you're working on.
The whole thing is open source. You own all your data. Nothing is locked in a proprietary platform.
How it works
What you'll need
Setup guide
Download Obsidian and create a new vault. This is just a folder on your computer where all your notes will live.
Create the PARA folder structure inside your vault:
00_Inbox/ 01_Projects/ 02_Areas/ 03_Resources/ 04_Archive/ 05_Attachments/ 06_Metadata/
00_Inbox is where new stuff lands. 01_Projects is for active work with deadlines. 02_Areas is for ongoing responsibilities (health, finances). 03_Resources is reference material. 04_Archive is for completed stuff.
Create a private repository on GitHub (e.g., my-vault).
In Obsidian, install the obsidian-git community plugin. This automatically syncs your vault to GitHub every few minutes.
Configure it to auto-pull and auto-push. Now your notes are backed up and accessible from anywhere.
Follow the Claude Code installation guide. Once installed, open your terminal, navigate to your vault folder, and run:
claude
Claude can now see all your notes and help you work with them.
Create a file called CLAUDE.md in the root of your vault. This is the instruction file that tells Claude how your vault works, what the folder structure means, and how you like to work.
You can start with the template from this repo and customize it. The more context you give Claude about your workflow, the better it works.
Commands are reusable prompts that live in .claude/commands/. Start with a daily kickoff:
Create .claude/commands/daily-kickoff.md with a prompt that describes your ideal morning review — what you want Claude to check, what questions to ask you, what to surface.
Then in Claude Code, just type /daily-kickoff and it runs.
This is the Pepper Potts backend — a tiny server that catches emails and turns them into vault notes.
your-app.vercel.app/api/email?token=YOUR_SECRETThat's it. Open your terminal each morning, run claude in your vault, and type /daily-kickoff.
From there, you build. Add more commands. Integrate your tools. Connect your calendar. The system grows with you.
Stuck on something?
If anything in this guide doesn't make sense — a term, a step, a concept — just ask Claude. That's the whole point. Open your terminal, type claude, and ask it in plain English.
“What is Git?” “How do I create a GitHub repo?” “What does PARA mean?” “Help me write a daily kickoff command.”
Claude Code is patient, thorough, and doesn't judge. It built this entire website. It can walk you through any step. You don't need to understand everything upfront — just start, and ask as you go.
Common questions
Credits