Andrej Karpathy said:

"There's room for an incredible new product in the second brain space"

This might be it.

(bookmark it)

Everyone is suddenly building a second brain. Karpathy's LLM wiki pattern went viral, and half of X is now hand-wiring Obsidian to Claude Code so an agent maintains their notes for them.

The idea is beautiful: stop making your AI re-read raw notes on every question. Let it build a wiki that compounds.

As Karpathy put it, "LLMs don't get bored, they don't forget to update a cross-reference (backlinks), and can touch 15 files in one pass."

But if you start doing it manually, it becomes a project in itself. You wire up the vault, the agents, the schedules, the integrations, and then you babysit all of it.

So I sat down with Arjun, who actually built the open source version of this, and we broke down what it looks like when the whole thing already works out of the box.

It just crossed 15K stars on GitHub.

Think Claude's desktop app, open source, with two things layered on top:

→ A work brain: background agents index your emails, meetings, and notes into a living knowledge graph that updates itself as you work.

→ Work surfaces: chat is not the best interface for real work, so you get an email client, a meeting note taker, a browser, and a code mode where you and the AI actually collaborate.

The part that got me: a customer email comes in asking for a product change, a background agent triages it, spins up Claude Code in its own worktree, and the feature is written before you are back at your desk.

Bring your existing Obsidian vault, connect Slack, X, and Fireflies, and let it run your day.

Here's the full breakdown of what we covered in this session:

Enjoy!

00:00 Intro
01:08 What is Roboat (an open source AI co-worker)
02:42 The second brain (a knowledge graph of your work)
04:01 Bringing your existing Obsidian vault in
04:46 Work surfaces
05:29 Meetings and automatic note taking
06:53 Connecting Slack, X and other sources
07:55 Background agents that run your day
09:24 Code mode (Claude Code and Codex)
10:18 Demo: from an email to written code
14:28 Guardrails: approvals and agent workspaces
17:15 Scheduling agents on a cron
18:52 The browser work surface (browser use)
20:42 Wrapping up: automating your whole day
22:44 Outro

Checkout Rowboat's GitHub repo: https://github.com/rowboatlabs/rowboat

(don't forget to star 🌟)

My co-founder recently wrote a great article on the same idea, and I highly recommend reading it as well.

The article is quoted below.

Here's my session with Arjun: