ENTRY 04 · SECOND BRAIN · FROM THE OBSIDIAN VAULT ▮

The second brain.

About 90 pages, Markdown, kept in Obsidian. I supply the sources and the questions; an agent called Hermes runs the rest of it, filing what I capture, keeping the index honest, and reminding me what's due. It manages more of my life than I'd care to admit. Most of the vault stays private. These are the notes clean enough to publish.

◇ HOW IT RUNS TWO AGENTS · ONE RASPBERRY PI

The split A reasoning agent does the judgement work: compliance reasoning, synthesis, anything that needs actual thinking. A second agent, Hermes, does the mechanical upkeep: ingesting, linking, updating the index and the log.

Hermes Runs 24/7 on a Raspberry Pi. It effectively runs the admin side of my life: it files what I capture, and it's what I rely on day to day to keep everything current.

Capture loop Notes captured on any device land in an inbox folder, sync to the Pi, get ingested automatically (a file-watcher fires on change), and sync back out to every device.

Two indexes Pages connect through wikilinks. The vault indexes itself on two axes: a topical page for what exists, and an append-only log for what happened and when.

Git-backed Every automated write gets committed, so a bad automated edit is one revert away. Sync and git stay separate on purpose: filesystem sync handles multiple devices, git lives on one machine for history. Two sync layers writing the same files causes conflicts.

Deadlines A plain YAML file of deadlines drives a morning reminder job, with configurable lead times. Adding a reminder is a few lines of YAML, not code.

House rules.

WHAT THE VAULT WRITES UNDER

Fixed templates.

Seven page types, each with a fixed template. Same sections, same frontmatter fields (title, type, status, tags, created, updated), every time. Area, concept, project, source, synthesis, capture: the shape is decided before I start writing.

Needs verification.

Writing rules forbid guessing. Anything unconfirmed gets marked Needs verification instead, resolved once it's actually checked, and the resolution goes into the log.

Contradictions get logged.

When new information conflicts with an existing page, the newer source wins. The correction is recorded in the log, not silently overwritten.

Private by default.

A large share of pages are marked private in frontmatter and never leave the machine. Only the cleaned-up notes get published here.

Published notes.

CLEANED UP FROM THE VAULT

The rest stays on the machine. These are the pages rewritten for someone who isn't me and cleared to leave it.

N-003 Local LLMs for compliance work 2026-07 FILED N-002 EDD files that survive an audit 2026-06 FILED N-001 What an A/I LFMC actually files every quarter 2026-06 FILED

EVERY NOTE HERE STARTED AS A PRIVATE VAULT NOTE. THESE ARE THE CLEANED-UP VERSIONS.