Transcript of Obsidian + Voice Control = PKM on Steroids (Cursor AI)

Record a daily note. Good evening. Take my daily note for today  and add a task to it, saying that I need to   record a video showing how I use my voice and the  Cursor AI coding app to control my Obsidian Vault. Also add in the note section that I'm really  proud of myself because I finally figured out   how to create my own MCP server here  in Cursor. This one connects to my   Gumroad account and can tell me anything,  including how many sales I've made that month. Also made a little server for my first go  at making an MCP server that tells the time. Going to show all of my viewers how I do  all of this using my voice and Obsidian. I'm going to do that right now. Hey there, it is I versus AI and what. Bell Ringing. Creating my daily note just as I instructed.  And also, if you heard that little happy beep   at the end, it is letting me know that it has  completed the task. This is my Obsidian Vault,   but not how you are used to normally seeing  it. This is Cursor. It is, as I mentioned,   an AI coding app which is meant really for  developers, and I'm going to tell you one thing in   case you're about to just nope out of here because  you just have no desire to mess with code. I am   not a developer. I can write a Python Hello World  script, which literally is three words: Echo Hello   World. That's it. That's all I can do. I have  done all of this without knowing how to code,   and what I want you to feel excited about is that  all of this is available to do without coding. So   let me first show you what this daily note looks  like and what we're looking at here on the screen   with Cursor, and then I'm going to show you  some of the unique ways that you can use it. Here we are in my Obsidian Vault, and you can  see that for today, Monday, it has taken a task. It has recorded the notes. So you can see the green and the red over  here indicate that Cursor has done something,   changed or added something. In this  case, it removed this empty task,   which happens on every new  note. It's part of the template,   and I can now accept this because Obsidian is a  markdown viewer. It's not really a markdown saver,   as it were. It's already showing these here  because, as far as it's concerned, these   exist. But as far as Cursor is concerned, I have  not yet accepted these as being truly a part of   the note until then. You can do that also on the  right-hand side, down here in the bottom right. You can accept all. That's because Cursor is a tool for developers.  But when I was thinking about how Cursor could be   helpful to me, I realized that I really want  you to lean forward and listen up. Because,   again, I'm not a coder and you don't have to  be a coder. And this is what's keeping people,   I think, from really getting the benefit of what  I can do for you. And if you can see me right now,   I'm literally shaking because I feel this  so strongly. There's so much power in AI,   but many of us kind of stop ourselves by going,  "Well, you know, but I'm not a coder," and code   makes me nervous. And I can't really  do that. But there's so much power in   what you can do if you leave the coding to  where it belongs, which is the AI model,   and you become the overseer, the idea person,  the creative person - then what we do well as   humans. And that's because when we think about  what code is, I'm going to show you that by   opening up a simple Hello World script.  I'm going to ask the model to create one. Hey there, can you create a Hello World script in   Python and just drop it into  the basket folder? Thank you. The model is going to go off and  create that Hello World script in   Python. It's going to find the basket  folder, it's going to create a script. There's our simple Hello World script.  We're going to click accept there,   and that's it. We can now run this Python file,   and it would simply print out Hello World.  In fact, let's see if we can do that. Great. Can you run this file for me,  please? Just show it in the terminal. It's going to run the Python script in the  terminal. I'm going to pop out the terminal   here; you can see it just over here. I missed  the opportunity to pop it out fast enough.   Let me see if I can get it. Yeah, there it  is. So there is the Hello World terminal,   and that's all it is. It's a simple little  script. But let's take a look at this Python.   This is code. But what really is code? Well, when  you stop and think about it, code is just letters   and sometimes numbers and symbols like this -  parentheses right here or this quote. And no   matter how complicated the code is, it's nothing  more than just letters, numbers, and symbols   that are meant to do a specific thing when that  script is run. In this case, output Hello World. But when you think about what a markdown  note is - or even a note you wrote to your   grandmother - it's just letters, numbers.  In this case, there's some emoji in there,   symbols. It's just the same as code. Code is  just a language that's been defined by humans   to do a certain thing. And so is English or  Spanish or French or any other language. It's   all meant to convey information: in one case  to a human and in the other case to a computer. Therefore, knowing that you can give any folder  you have - in this case, an Obsidian Vault - or   in another case, let's say you want to keep  track of some recipes from your grandmother,   for example, who you just wrote a happy letter  to, and she sent you a picture of a recipe for   your favorite peanut butter cookies. Now, this  is not my grandmother, nor my recipe. I found   it on Google, but it's great for showing you  one of the ways in which having AI work with   you in your Obsidian Vault can be a game changer.  You have a bunch of these that she's given you,   and you want to turn these into something that's  in your Obsidian Vault. This is how you do it. I'm   going to close out this Hello World.py file.  I'm going to minimize all the folders in my   vault over here on the left-hand side. And I'm  going to close today's daily note. And finally,   I'm going to close the terminal, which  you can do by hiding the panel here. Here in Cursor, you can toggle  panels on and off. And in Cursor,   you can add images. I'm going to click here  to add this peanut butter cookies image. And I'm going to use the app Whisper  Typing, which is the app I've been   using to give dictation to Cursor. And  that's really what I love about this:   I have the setup, and you can see that I  have the app Whisper Typing. And you can   see on screen right now, there's an  image of how this looks on my phone. The buttons I'm using to control  Whisper Typing - the top button,   the teal button - I click once to start  talking. And then, to automatically send   the message, I just double-click it and it will  automatically send the message. If you're on Mac,   there are other apps that I have heard of; Super  Whisper is one that's regularly recommended. And the whole reason why this ability to  do talking and basically using my voice to   control my absentee vote actually came from  Karpathy, who's one of the co-founders of   OpenAI. He was there in the beginning, and he  mentioned a few months back about vibe coding,   where you fully give into the vibes, you embrace  the exponentials - whatever that means. But one of   the things he talked about was how he used Cursor,  Composer, Cursors - the app - and the Composer is   basically the agent mode, along with Claude Sonnet  3.5, and how he used it to simply vibe code. Now,   vibe code is kind of taken off. And some  people hate the term, and some people are   totally embracing it. But what I thought was,  "Well, I can't code." But then I thought, do   you know what would be so cool? It would be really  cool. I know that in a den, I think it has an API. Wouldn't it be cool if I could create  in a den workflows with my voice,   where I could simply describe  what I wanted the workflow to do? So the first thing I did in Cursor was say,  "Here's the documentation for all of the   endpoints for n8n," meaning that I can create a  workflow, retrieve all workflows. And here's one:   update a workflow. That means I can have it create  a workflow. And then I can say, "Hmm, can you make   the nodes be a little farther apart? Or could you  add a sticky note behind this node?" So I asked,   "How could it connect to this API?" And Claude  responded and said, "You just need to do it with   a Python script." So it wrote a Python script, it  asked me for my API key, and the next thing you   know, it was printing out all of my workflows.  And I was hooked. And that's how it began. So my mind went on from there, and I thought,  "Well, that's cool. But what if I could just   over here - when you look at what is going  on, what is going on?" And I thought, "Well,   what if I could just go over here? What is this  supposed to be over here? It's supposed to be,   well, you know, files and folders." Because  when I first opened Cursor, what I saw was this,   except there were no recent projects. And I  saw that the projects were a folder, and I knew   enough about coding to know that a coding project  is nothing more than a folder. And I said, "Well,   what do I work with every day that is  just folders and files?" My Obsidian   Vault. So I decided I could open  it and just see what would happen. Of course, because I'm working in my very  precious Obsidian Vault, I did have on the   guardrails. But there are some safeguards I  have in place in case it goes off the rails. Because I'm looking at U3 point seven  solid, it does go off the rails. Xylophone Music. Cookie story here. Because you're thinking how  nice it would be to be able to get some of these   old family recipes into your vault, even with  an added image - maybe of the old recipe from   your grandparents, an added image, maybe of  the old recipe from your grandmother's recipe   box. I've added the image here to the prompt, and  I'm gonna use Whisper Typing to add it to a note. The image that's included with this prompt  has a recipe for peanut butter cookies from   my grandmother. Can you create a note for this,  a new note, and add it to my basket folder? But   under my basket folder, can you add a new folder  called Grandma's Recipe? And can you put the note   in there, mark it with today's date, and then  also put a placeholder for where I can actually   drop the image in later in my Obsidian Vault? And  also add a little story at the bottom just saying,   "This was my favorite recipe for my grandmother.  It makes me remember her and how much I loved her   and how much I loved spending summers  at her house by the beach." Thanks. I'm gonna double-click to get that to head right  on into the prompt, and Cursor begins to create   that note. Now here's a cool thing: you can  see that it's calling a tool. This is an MCP   server. It is all the rage. It has come out  recently - Anthropic. And when I say recently,   I mean November, which is recently in  olden times, but in these new AI times,   that's basically 10 years ago. But this new model  context protocol is taking a lot of people in   the AI space by storm, me included, because it  allows AI to connect to tools - in this case,   a simple tool that I asked it to  create for me that gets the date   and time in my time zone. And if today is a  holiday, it will also let me know that too. I prompted Cursor to create a server for me. And even though it is such a really simple server,  it just does one thing. It has one tool call. I   was really proud of myself when I was able to  figure out how to give Claude and Cursor the   information needed to create the server. So  if you wanna know how I'm creating these MCP   servers - the good, the bad, the ugly, no  hype here - if you wanna know that, let me   know in the comments and I will create a video  for you about how MCP servers work and how to   start creating your own or to find many, because  there are many already out there to download. Here is our grandma's recipe. It picked up on the  fact that grandma's name is Linda. At least it is;   there is a Linda. Let's look in the image here,  from the recipe file of Linda. That is so cool.   It picked up on that - Grandma and Linda's peanut  butter cookies. I'm gonna go ahead and accept the   file, but I also wanna draw your attention down  here to the lower right-hand side where my mouse   is showing you that you can reject these changes  if you don't like them, or you can accept them. And the reason why is because when a developer  is creating code, it will ask the model to go   in and say, "Change the code from, say, line one  to line 12 here where the note properties are,   where the YAML is, and maybe add something  else to that." And the model can go in and   change just this section. You can also select a  section like this and then actually use Control   K and change just this section as well. Here you  can ask it, for example, to add something - some   more tags or add a description. In fact, let's  do that. I'm gonna go ahead and accept this file   just to make sure that the changes we currently  have stay put. And then I'm going to ask it to   add a description. And I could do this with  my typing, like you can hear me doing now,   or I could just use the app. But for something  like this, I'm just gonna go ahead and submit this   edit here. And this is one of the things that's so  cool - look at that. It just pops in a description   in there. And now I bet you wanna see what it  looks like over in the Obsidian Vault. Well,   I do, so let's go look. Look at this: there's a  new folder called Grandma's Recipes, and here's   Grandma Linda's Peanut Butter. And then, to  finish it off, I could by hand add the picture,   and there is the beginning of you effortlessly  - effortlessly, or at least with very little   effort - adding recipes from your family that  you could then combine or have it print out.   One of the cool things you could do with  this is you could print this out as a PDF. Actually, let me show you a fun little thing  that you can do that I do regularly when I,   for the products I sell on Gumroad, will always  add a quick start guide. So you might wanna add   some colors here. So you can do that, and maybe  a personal note - and maybe the personal note   section might be teal, for example. And then you  might also wanna add maybe a quick emoji right   here. So I'm gonna just put that emoji outside  the font tag, and I'm gonna just right-click here,   which is where I have my emojis showing up here  in my menu. And I can just put like a picture of,   like, grandma - maybe there's someone here. Maybe  that, maybe, oh, maybe her recipe got a first,   metal, first-place metal. So let's add that. This  one got a first-place metal. And now when we go   over here and we output to export to PDF, here  is Grandma Linda's peanut butter cookies as a   nice PDF. This could be a really nice gift to  give to your family - of collecting a bunch of   recipes and adding them together. And they could  say, "Wow, this bunch have taken so much work   to write out." It could be like, "Nope, it was  easy." And you can see here that it followed my   instructions and added a placeholder for Grandma  Linda's peanut butter cookies. It gave me a fake   link that doesn't exist because I asked it  to. So I'm just gonna move the link from   above to here. And then I'm gonna toggle  the view again. And there it is - look at   that, the original recipe card from grandma.  This is so fun. Oh man, I love this stuff. That's one idea of how you can  use AI in your Obsidian Vault. So now let me give you a tour of how Cursor works. When you first open Cursor, you're gonna be  greeted with a screen like this. And the first   thing to know is that Cursor is a fork of Visual  Studio Code - an app that's been around since 2015   and has built many of the apps that are out there  in the world. It's used by developers all around   the world. It's very well known, very popular, and  it has a lot of extensions that you can add to it,   including two extensions that I looked at when  I was trying to decide what AI coding app I was   gonna go with or what way or method I was  gonna move forward with it. Because there   are also these extensions. This is RooCode,  which is a fork of the original extension   Cline. They both do similar things, and you can  see I've been using Cline recently. In fact,   it's what helped me build the MCP server  for my Gumroad shop that I'm gonna show you   momentarily. And when I was trying to decide  what I wanted to use, I looked at Cline,   I looked at RooCode - both of them - and they  both worked well and did good things. I also   looked at Windsurf, which you can see with all  of these, that they're all basically, they look   somewhat the same. And that's because they're  all basically a fork of Visual Studio Code. I'm going through over here with Cursor; I'll tell  you why I chose Cursor. But let's head on back   into - I’m gonna head on into my n8n workspace,  and the place that I wanna take your attention   to is over here with the settings. There are a lot  of features that come with Cursor that are really   great, and one that you'll find yourself using  is the auto-run mode. When you first start using   Cursor, every time it tries to make a tool call  or make a command in the terminal, it won't need   to ask you for that, and believe me, that'll get  pretty tiring pretty quickly. And no other tool   has the same setup that I saw here in Cursor,  where it has both a command allow list - like   anytime you wanna run this command, go ahead and  do it, have no problem - and also a command deny   list for never running these commands without  my permission, which I felt was super important.   And believe me, today I just put this one in  because it removed a folder that I needed, and   I had - basically, I was able to get that folder  back - but I added this really quickly after the   model made that mistake earlier today. And you  can also have a delete file protection that'll   just keep it from deleting files, which is another  protection for Obsidian if you're feeling like,   "Oh my gosh, my vault - I would not wanna trust  this thing with my vault." You can really lock   down the commands that you don't want it to ever  use without permission. The play sound on finish   is a new one; it's in beta. It is a bit janky,  to be honest. It does not play consistently. And so for that, I have a little command which  I will show you here in the rules section, which   overcomes that problem and plays it consistently  - a little command that works on Windows. And I'm   sure there's something similar that works on Mac.  But the thing I wanted to really show you about   here is down here with the code base indexing  and all of these docs. When you're working with   a model trying to teach it how to do something or  have it work together with you to, for example,   make a new MCP server, the documents help you a  great deal. Like, for example, the n8n documents   help you a great deal in being able to give  information quickly to the model. And here's how   it works: I'm gonna go over here and just start  a new chat here, and it would be wonderful if,   when I click out of the last chat, it doesn't  close the window. It just opens up a new chat   automatically. And over here, under the add  context, this is key for getting real value   out of the model here in Cursor. It allows you  to add files and folders. So you can say, "Hey,   I did a recipe for my grandmother's peanut butter  cookies. And I like how you had that laid out,   and I especially like the colors used in the  headers. Can you use those same font colors in   the next recipe I give it and then give it your  mother's favorite recipe for lasagna?" And it   will repeat that same style of note because it  has access to this under the files and folders. The rules are very, very important in Cursor.  These are my rules - feel free to copy them,   take a screenshot, give them to ChatGPT,  and say, "Please tell me what this says.   Write out the text in this image." And  this is the one thing I want to tell   you about Cursor and any of these tools -  Windsurf, RooCode, Cline - is that when you   first begin working with the model, it's just  gonna do things that drive you crazy, period. The rules down here for project-specific  rules are really important. And over time, I have built this out because  what you will find is that the model will make   mistakes, as I've already said, and it's your job  really as the kind of manager of the model, and if   you want your process with Cursor or with any of  these AI development apps or tools, you wanna be   able to instruct the model to stop doing a  thing that it's basically constantly doing. So every time it would make a mistake in a call,  for example, when it calls a tool - these are all   errors that the n8n tool, MCP server, has  gotten when the Cursor model tried to use   it - and every time I got an error, I would just  put it in here until it just stops making errors,   and that's why it's so important to put these down  at the bottom and stop the model from doing the   same thing over and over again, because even once  you correct it in this chat, start a new chat,   and it's forgotten everything again.  So that's something I really wanted to   stress with you if you're using Cursor for  even working in your Obsidian Vault - how   to kind of train your model over time is  really important for saving your sanity. Now let's head over to the fun part: MCP servers. The tools show you, as I have done for this  Gumroad MCP server that I worked with Cline,   actually in VS Code to create, because  Cline is just, for some reason,   really good at creating MCP servers  that, over here, using Claude 3.5,   3.7, would get into loops and get stuck, whereas  Cline was able to do it more or less in one go. And this Gumroad here has all these different  tools, and these are basically the same as the   endpoints in the API in here for create  product. I can create a product right   here from inside Cursor, naming the  product, the price, the description, custom permalink, any of all of that information  requires shipping - everything can be initially   done right here just using my voice and updating  a product as well, to deleting a product,   listing the number of subscribers you have. And  there's so many things that you can do. And this   wonderful Gumroad MCP I simply created  by taking the Gumroad API documentation,   giving it to the model - just the link -  and saying, "I need a server that connects   to all of these APIs, all of these endpoints  right here." And Cline was able to do that. So let me show you how this works.  I'm gonna use my voice to ask for a   list of products that are available on the store. Could you give me a list of products on  the Gumroad store? And can you tell me   the lifetime sales for that product? Nothing  else, just the sales number and the product. And the model's now going to call the MCP tool,  list products. It does know what tools are   available. It's gonna show me many units I have  sold. And you're gonna hear that little console   beep. I'm gonna pop out the terminal here so you  can see the console beep plays there. And this is   the simple command. And the 200 and the 100 - you  can ask the model about this - but it basically is   the volume, I think, and the pitch. So this was  the one that I thought was easiest on my ears. And to get that to play, I've simply put it  in my rules. Here, upon completion of output   as the last step, run the command to alert  the user that the output is complete. Do so   without additional commentary; simply run  the command. So, feel free to add that in. So, Cursor has been helping me rock star my  Obsidian Vault. I never really believed it   was gonna work out as well as it did, and  it has. It helps me throughout the day to   just drop a quick note into a daily note -  make a quick note. It's also helped me do   things like go through all of the notes  I made in March and make sure that the   header - all of them have the correct header  that I need, or the correct note property at   the top - so you can make bulk changes to all  of your Obsidian notes right here in Cursor,   and again, non-destructive, so if you don't  like the changes just simply reject all,   just undo them. But I also use AI in my Obsidian  Vault using text generator templates, a plugin   that you need to know about that also helps me to  create note properties before I discovered Cursor,   and I sometimes still use it when I'm creating a  note by hand to just drop in some note properties,   drop in some links. Those text generators -  I show you how to use them and how powerful   they can be for your Obsidian Vault. In  this video, which is on screen right now.