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Using AI with your Obsidian vault — including the PDFs you never read

· 4 min read
The MindMax team
The MindMax team
Building MindMax

The simplest way to use AI with an Obsidian vault is to open the same folder in a second app that reads it in place. MindMax opens your vault directly — no import, no copy, no upload of the whole folder — and can answer questions across your notes and the PDFs and EPUBs sitting in your attachments folder, with quotes that open on the page. Obsidian keeps working on the same files.

Most AI options for Obsidian are plugins that send note text to a model. They help with notes. They do very little for the other half of a typical vault: the two hundred PDFs your notes are about.

The half of the vault that never gets read​

Look at your attachments folder. Papers, reports, books, presentations — saved because they mattered, linked from a note, opened once. In Obsidian a PDF is something a link points at; you read it elsewhere, and your notes about it live in one place while the document lives in another.

That is the part an AI can change the most. A question like "which of the papers I saved on pricing disagree with my note on it?" needs both halves at once: your notes and the documents underneath them.

Step by step​

  1. Open the vault as a folder. In MindMax, open the vault's folder. Nothing is imported or converted; the files stay exactly where they are, with the same names. MindMax keeps its own working data in a hidden directory and otherwise writes only files you ask for.
  2. Check that links still work. Open a note full of [[wiki links]] and click one. Links are resolved against the files in the folder, and backlinks are computed from the files themselves.
  3. Open a PDF you saved a year ago. It reads in place. Ask what it claims; each point comes back with a quote that opens on the page.
  4. Ask across the vault. Mention a folder in your question — your reading folder, a project folder — and its notes and documents become the subject of that question, with every claim naming the file it came from.
  5. Keep the answer as a note. Save it into the vault as an ordinary Markdown file, quotes and all. Obsidian sees it the moment it is written.
  6. Keep using Obsidian. Both apps can run on the same folder. Just do not edit the same note in both at the same moment, as with any two editors.

What carries over and what does not​

Carries over: the folder itself, wiki links and backlinks, front matter, folder structure and file names (untouched), daily notes, every PDF and EPUB in the vault, and canvases — both apps use the open JSON Canvas format, so a canvas opens in either one (branching and AI follow-up only work in MindMax).

Does not carry over: community plugins (they keep running in Obsidian, on the same folder), Obsidian Sync and Publish, and themes and CSS snippets.

Who should not bother​

If what you want from AI is help writing notes inside Obsidian, a plugin is the shorter path, and you should take it. If you read and capture mostly on your phone, MindMax will not help: it is a desktop app for macOS and Windows, and that gap matters more than anything above.

The case for opening your vault in MindMax is narrower and stronger: the documents in your vault are dead weight today, and you would like them to be readable, quotable and answerable without moving them anywhere.

What about privacy?​

Opening, reading and searching your vault happens on your machine; nothing is uploaded in bulk. When you ask a question, the text needed for that answer is sent to the model — the subscription's, or your own provider's if you use your own API key. If nothing may leave the machine, point MindMax at a model running locally, and read what local models can and cannot carry first.

The row-by-row compatibility table is on using MindMax with an Obsidian vault, and the step-by-step guide is opening an Obsidian vault. Download MindMax and open the vault you already have.