I’ve talked about my use of Obsidian in the past. It’s my second brain, yet it takes too much manual effort to track everything in it. What important emails were there today? What meetings? Any tasks? In my role as a security practioner, were there new vulnerabilities to pay attention to?
So over the last few weeks I’ve been fiddling with Claude to make things a little easier for me, slowly iterating over a few skills to make it more useful. Currently, these are my three skills:
/morning-briefing: this looks at my calendar for the day, identifies any meetings and creates individual meeting notes using my Obsidian meeting note template, gives me a report of the number of new vulnerabilities that have come in over the last 24h (72h on Mondays) and the number closed out and which new vulnerabilities I should be most worried about, it looks at my email to me tell me what’s most important for me to prioritize, and tells me what OmniFocus tasks are due today or are overdue/evening-debrief: looks at emails I sent today and tells me if there’s anything urgent I need to respond to before I sign off, creates tasks in OmniFocus for anything I’ve tasked people with (to remind me to followup), and gives me an overview of the vulnerability handling that day; all of this is added to my daily note/weekend-summary: this skill gives me the overview of the week and pulls out all of my meeting notes, looks at all of the vulnerability data, the number of meetings (and with who), pulls out any themes for the week, challenges and accomplishments, any outstanding open loops for the week, and assigns an intensity score; this gets added to my weekly note
It’s taken quite a bit of fiddling to get all of this! But right now I’m pretty pleased and looking for other ways to make this useful. One of the challenges I have is my memory sucks, and that’s what Obsidian was supposed to help with — and it definitely does, but with so many notes everywhere it gets hard to step back and get the high level view of everything and tie it all together, so this helps immensely.
There are a few tools necessary for this. One is an MCP server and tool called BragAI which was written by a co-worker; it does all of the email/calendar heavy lifting. I was looking to see if it was public and it’s not so… you’ll need to find some other MCP server to handle that with whichever mail/calendar clients you use. Note there is something out there called BragAI now, but it’s not the same thing — I’ve never tried it and don’t endorse it.
The other was an MCP server for OmniFocus. I found one, but it was written in javascript, which meant I couldn’t look at it and understand what it was doing (since I don’t write code in javascript), so I asked Cursror to help me write a functionally-equivalent one in Python (which I can understand). So together we created pymnifocus which will let you either interact with OmniFocus on the commandline or as an MCP server.
And then more recently, because we use OSIDB internally to manage our flaw database, Cursor and I created osidb-mcp which is an MCP server to interact with the OSIDB instance using the available osidb-bindings (also all written in Python).
Both pymnifocus and osidb-mcp are available via Homebrew and pip. Patches and feedback welcome!
The creation of these MCP servers has been a lot of fun and opened a world of potential to these skills by helping me keep track of everything in Obsidian. With these tools I have the memory that I need. It’s also been interesting to get hands-on with some of these AI advancements, which has helped me learn faster.
Of course, running Claude in “yolo” mode is desireable but not really practical. There’s a few ways I can probably tackle this. One was to containerize things, but another co-worker pointed out nono which is a sandboxing effort for agents, which sounded perfect and very lightweight. This morning I figured most of it out, but since pymnifocus requires talking to a running instance of OmniFocus via AppleScript and OmniJS scripts, it was the one MCP server I couldn’t get working in nono. The rest work fine with some fiddling. So there’s still some work there to be done before I can have this fully automated. Perhaps in the next few weeks, but not yet.