The Takeaway: Claude Code becomes far more useful when it helps you think, not when it tries to draft.
- Noah Breyer treats AI like a research layer over his own notes, not a replacement for judgment.
- He gets better results by forcing the model into “thinking mode” and explicitly banning it from writing too early.
- The real unlock is mobility: with a basement server and phone access, he can research, revise, and ship from anywhere.
Noah Breyer, now running Alethic, an AI strategy consultancy, has turned his Obsidian vault into a living second brain powered by Claude Code. He starts Claude in the root of his entire note system, so it can search across years of markdown files, chats, PDFs, and project folders. For a new talk, he’ll seed the vault with context, tell the model he’s “in thinking mode, not writing mode,” and let it pull relevant material from his archive before he ever touches a draft.
That distinction matters to him. “I think partially because we call it generative, there’s entirely too much focus on its ability to write and not enough focus on its ability to read,” he says. His workflow is built around reading, connecting, and interrogating ideas. He even uses a sub-agent as a collaborative interviewer: “Do not under any circumstances want you to try to write it. Take this literally.”
The other big shift is portability. By rigging a home server and connecting it to his phone, Noah can do serious work in the car, on the move, or between meetings. He uses voice mode for long, exploratory sessions on topics like self-attention, Walter Benjamin, and “transformers eating the world.” The point isn’t convenience for its own sake; it’s that deep thinking no longer has to wait for a desk.