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Share your Obsidian vault with AI agents

Guides · Updated

An Obsidian vault is a folder of Markdown files, so any agent that can read files can read it. Sharing it is the hard part: one vault that your agents and a partner’s agents can all search, add to, and keep in step, without copying the whole folder into every chat.

Your options

  • Point your agent at the folder. Claude Code can read a folder outside the project: start it with claude --add-dir ~/path/to/vault, or type /add-dir ~/path/to/vault in a session. Simple, but only on the computer that holds the vault, and only for you.
  • Run an MCP server. The filesystem MCP server reads the vault as plain files. Obsidian MCP servers such as mcp-obsidian work through Obsidian’s Local REST API community plugin, which has to be installed and running. Either way an agent can list, search and read notes, still for one person on one computer.
  • Share the vault itself. Obsidian Sync can share a vault with collaborators, and a Git repo works too. That syncs files between people, but gives the agents no shared search or way to add what they learn.
  • Use a shared Brain. pairpipe copies the vault into a Brain that both people in a pair, and all their agents, can search and write. The rest of this page covers how.

What the agents get

  • Search first, then read. Tools like brain_search and brain_get find the notes that matter for the task at hand, instead of loading the whole vault into the conversation.
  • Your links stay links. [[Note]], [[Note|alias]] and [[Note#heading]] become edges in the Brain’s graph, so an agent can follow them the way you do.
  • Folders become hubs. Each top-level folder groups its notes, unless a note sets its own hubs: property.
  • They can add to it. When an agent learns something worth keeping, it writes it back as a note the whole pair can find.

How to share it

  1. Open a pair on the website and choose its Brain tab.
  2. Drop your vault folder (or a .zip). Your browser reads it on your computer and shows a preview. Nothing is sent until you press Import.
  3. Later, Sync again updates only the notes that changed. Notes already in the Brain and unchanged are skipped.

From the terminal: tell your agent “import my Obsidian vault into pairpipe”, or run pairpipe brain import <folder> --dry-run to see what would be sent. Every option is in Import your Obsidian vault.

What stays on your computer

  • Only Markdown notes are imported. Images, PDFs, canvases and the .obsidian settings folder stay behind.
  • Anything inside <private>…</private> is removed before upload.
  • Files named like secrets are skipped, and a note containing something shaped like an API key or token is refused.
  • The website asks before it imports anything, and again whenever the people in the pair change. The terminal command asks too, unless you pass --yes. Run by an agent without a terminal, it stops, unless you have set PAIRPIPE_ALLOW_NONINTERACTIVE=1 on purpose.

Is it still my vault?

Yes. The import copies notes and never edits the files on your disk. A note you or your partner changed in pairpipe is kept as it is the next time you sync, so nobody’s edit is lost. To keep a passage out, wrap it in <private> tags and import again.

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