Remote Frog

We recently talked about using Day One as a working memory for your AI tool. Day One was a solid choice because it fits naturally into both workflows and spare time, but there are many other options. Another favorite of mine is Obsidian. If you use Obsidian for your notes and Cursor (or really any other AI environment) for coding, you can connect them in under two minutes. The result? Your AI agent has access to your entire vault—your notes, your highlights, your second brain—as context. Just it won’t forget the details.

what’s Obsidian?

Obsidian is a note-taking app that works with Markdown, locally. It stores everything as plain text Markdown files on your disk (works on almost any system), so there’s no lock-in and you can move it to any editor whenever you want. The most powerful part of the approach is that notes link to each other like a wiki. And it has an incredible ecosystem of plugins to extend the tool for many different tasks.

The really cool thing about Obsidian is that you don’t have “scattered notes”—every time you link one note to another, you’re weaving a network of ideas that you can later visualize as an interactive mind map. You get a graph where each note is a node, and the connections are the links between them, Highly customizable, even showing tags… In this map, you can move nodes to focus on an area of the graph, click on points, zoom in or out, filter by tags or link types, and see how one topic leads to another, almost like you’re walking through the inside of your head.

Obsidian with AI Superpowers

The thing is the connections don’t happen magically—you have to write classic wiki-style links like [[Note Name]] or Markdown links. For me, this was a no-go. Obsidian stayed on a fantastic idea, but working twice when I’m taking notes to keep them linked was overkilling… Until AI could scan content and detect these implicit relationships, freeing you from the boredom of marking every relationship. Now it’s simply magical: the notes you add can find their place and their relationships on their own, integrating into your mental map naturally.

And it can do magic like—once the MCP is installed—telling your AI tool something like:

Read the posts at https://remotefrog.com/category/ai/rss/ and create items in my Obsidian vault in the AI folder, where they belong. You can make subfolders if it makes sense.

…we’ll see how that turns out in a moment.

Taking It Further: Obsidian + Excalidraw

But we can go much further in just 5 more minutes.

Excalidraw is one of my favorite apps. It lets you think visually and draw mind maps by hand in a very, very easy way, and with a simple but pleasant and effective look. So I use it a lot. For instance to draw parts of the ETL pipeline I work with:

What if I could now connect those drawings with my regular notes as if everything were one? Well, I can!! With a plugin. To install it: open Obsidian, go to Settings → Community plugins, enable community plugins, click “Browse”, search for “Excalidraw”, choose the plugin (there’s one that’s constantly updated with over 5M installations—that’s a good sign), and activate it.

From that moment, a “Create new drawing” button appears in the Obsidian sidebar. Click it, and an empty screen opens where you can make diagrams, mind maps, or various drawings with Excalidraw and save them inside your vault as just another file—and therefore linkable with your other notes! Mind-blowing.

If you don’t like Excalidraw but want to experiment with other types of mind maps, there are plugins like Mind Map/Markmind. Supposedly (I haven’t used them), you write your note in list format (bullets and sub-bullets), and the plugin shows it as a mind map that updates as you edit the text.

Let’s go! Setting Up the Obsidian MCP in 4 Steps

1. Install the Local REST API Plugin in Obsidian

Go to Settings → Community plugins → Browse → search for “Local REST API” → Install → Enable.

Once activated, go to the plugin settings and copy the API key it generates.

2. Install the MCP Server

Open your terminal and run:

npm install -g obsidian-mcp-server


3. Configure Cursor

Edit the ~/.cursor/mcp.json file and add:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "obsidian": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "obsidian-mcp-server"],
      "env": {
        "OBSIDIAN_API_KEY": "COPY HERE YOUR API KEY",
        "OBSIDIAN_BASE_URL": "http://127.0.0.1:27123"
      }
    }
  }
}

4. Restart Cursor

Close and reopen Cursor. Done.

⚠️ A Couple of Important Notes

First: Obsidian needs to be running for the MCP to work. The Local REST API plugin creates a local server that’s only active when Obsidian is running.

Second: If you have multiple vaults, the MCP will be configured for ONE of them, since you need to install the REST API plugin for each vault and the generated API key will be different (and the folder too).

What Can You Do With This Integration?

A lot. Read notes and create notes from your AI agent, classify these notes or have the agent reason about them, connect ideas found in documentation… or, even, remember that example from just a bit earlier?

Lee los posts en https://remotefrog.com/category/ai/rss/ y crea items en mi obsidian vault en el folder AI, donde corresponda. Puedes hacer subfolders si tiene sentido

Well, it works 😀

Or:

Read the post “Context 101: AI for non-developers” and create an Excalidraw note in my Obsidian vault with the concepts.

And voilà. Sure, you need to work on it a bit and for isntance, add links. But I bet a well-described skill fixes it (I’ve created other excalidraws with links from AI tools, so I can confirm there is no blocker 😀 ):