brain-starter

A working personal second brain you can fork and make your own. Markdown + YAML, Obsidian-compatible, Karpathy-flavoured external cognition. Comes with a setup wizard that walks you through populating it in ~30 minutes via Claude Code.

What this is: a battle-tested vault structure for capture, distillation, retrieval, content creation, decision journalling, and quiet relationship tracking — designed to compound over decades without methodology thrash.

What this isn't: a Notion template, a productivity app, or an AI chatbot. It's plain markdown files in folders. Anything you write here outlives any tool.

Why it exists

Most personal knowledge management systems die within three months. They die for predictable reasons: capture is too high-friction, processing becomes a chore, the structure was over-engineered before you knew what you needed, or the plugin you depended on broke.

This template fixes the predictable failures up front:

• Capture is one keystroke. Daily notes + inbox + (optional) voice-note pipeline.
• Processing is a 15-minute Sunday ritual with a template and a /weekly-review skill that walks you through it.
• Structure is committed for ≥12 months. Ten numbered folders, atomic notes, MOCs for navigation, state in frontmatter. The architecture is finished; only the content evolves.
• Plugin discipline. Bases (Obsidian core) is preferred over Dataview wherever it covers the need. Cap ~10 community plugins. Everything else is plain markdown.
• Designed to survive plugin death, Obsidian death, your-laptop death. Triple-backup: Obsidian Sync + Git + Time Machine.

What you get

Structure

• 10 numbered top-level folders + _Meta infrastructure + _Wiki (deferred Karpathy LLM-wiki scaffold)
• 18 Templater templates covering every note type
• Documented Bases view patterns (you build the actual .base files in Obsidian — they vary by Obsidian version, so the template documents the queries to build rather than shipping versioned files)
• Generic schema spec, workflow doc, plugin list, durability plan

Disciplines you can opt into

• Capture & learning (everyone) — daily notes, inbox, atoms, sources, theme maps
• Content creation (opt-in) — voice formula, pre-publish gate, vocabulary, pillars, channels, content process, cadence
• People (opt-in) — quiet CRM for relationships that matter
• Decisions (opt-in) — Annie Duke-style decision journal with retrospectives
• Projects (opt-in) — defined-outcome work tracking

Claude integration

• CLAUDE.md at vault root onboards any Claude Code session to the schema, conventions, and your voice
• .claude/skills/setup.md — interactive wizard that populates the vault from your answers
• Skills for /capture, /atomize, /weekly-review, /draft (content), /grade (content)

Quick start

git clone https://github.com/<you>/brain-starter ~/Brain
cd ~/Brain
claude

Then in Claude:

/setup

That runs the setup wizard. ~30-45 minutes of questions, and you'll have:

• Your Now.md dashboard populated
• Your first 9 atoms (3 beliefs, 3 moments, 3 concepts)
• Your Who I am integrating narrative
• Your Why, Mission, Values files
• Optionally: your voice formula, brand bible, pillars (if you do content)
• Optionally: 5-10 people stubs, first project, first decision (if those modules matter to you)
• A weekly-review template and reminder
• A private GitHub repo (if you want one) for offsite backup

After the wizard, see SETUP.md for next steps (Obsidian config, plugin installs, sync setup).

Use cases

• Operators and founders — content for LinkedIn/X without the LinkedIn-ghostwriter cadence
• Researchers and learners — read with intent, distill what you learned, find it again years later
• Decision-heavy roles — decision journals you'll actually re-read because they're queryable
• Anyone tired of Notion drift — local-first, markdown, survives any tool

Philosophy

This template is opinionated about three things and minimal about everything else.

Opinionated:

1. Atomic notes + MOCs for navigation. One idea per note, dense linking, hand-curated maps. Folgezettel-lite without the IDs.
2. State in frontmatter, not folder location. Reading status, draft status, project status all live in YAML. Bases views render the boards. Files don't move around as state changes.
3. Anti-AI cadence rules for any content you ship. The setup wizard offers to install these. Most LLM-generated content is detectable in two sentences; the rules cap em dashes, mirror inversions, tricolons, colon-reveals, and journalistic clichés.

Minimal everywhere else. Folder structure is flat. Plugin list is short. Templates are templates, not philosophy. Make it yours.

Acknowledgements

This template is the open-source extraction of one person's working second brain — built over weeks of refinement with Claude Code as a thinking partner. Patterns drawn from:

• Andy Matuschak (evergreen notes, atomic granularity)
• Tiago Forte (PARA, capture habits)
• Nick Milo (LYT / ACE structure)
• Andrej Karpathy (the LLM-wiki idea file pattern, deferred here as _Wiki/)
• Annie Duke (decision journalling)
• Heath brothers (the SUCCESs framework for content)

License

MIT. Fork freely. Make it yours.