Newsletter Archive

DeveloPassion's Newsletter 208 - Claws

Sebastien Dubois

25 Feb 2026 — 14 min read

Edition 208 of my newsletter, discussing Knowledge Work, AI, Knowledge Management, Management, Zen Productivity, Personal Organization, and more!

Hello everyone! I'm Sébastien Dubois, your host. You're receiving this email because you signed up for DeveloPassion's Newsletter, or bought one of my products. Thank you for being here with me ✨

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Welcome

Welcome to all the new readers ❤️

Another week, another newsletter! I hope that you all had a great one 🤩

These past few weeks have been a wild ride. I survived Binche's Carnival in Belgium (barely 😅), I'm planning my wedding (I've found my wedding suit! ❤️), I'm back at the gym after my injury, and somehow I still managed to ship three new Obsidian plugins, build a complete CRM inside my vault, and watch my AI agent evolve from a helpful assistant into something that feels like a real operational partner.

By the way if you want to see some awesome pictures of the Carnival of Binche: https://www.facebook.com/villedebincheofficiel

The "Claws" theme isn't just clever wordplay. It's about how OpenClaw has gotten its claws into every part of my workflow, and how the new Obsidian CLI REST MCP plugin for Obsidian is connecting everything together in ways I couldn't have imagined just a month ago.

Alright, let's gooooo 🚀

This Week's Highlights

🤖 AI agents that actually work — OpenClaw crossed the line from tool to partner
🔌 Obsidian CLI REST MCP — The missing bridge between my Obsidian vault and AI
📊 CRM in Obsidian — All customer and sales data, beautifully integrated
⏰ Time Machine plugin — Easy note recovery for your notes, finally
⏰ Bookshelf plugin — Easy note recovery for your notes, finally

Before You Go Any Further

I want to reach more people. Got 20 seconds? Then share the link with one friend/colleague who would benefit from joining us! And of course, don't forget to also mention the Knowii Community ❤️

And if you bought some of my products or courses? Then please leave a rating/review. It really helps a lot ❤️

The Lab 🧪

When AI Gets Its Claws Into Everything

In the last edition, I told you about setting up OpenClaw and the concept of Agentic Knowledge Management (AKM). What I didn't fully realize at the time was how quickly it would go from "interesting experiment" to "I can't imagine working without this anymore."

Link: https://www.dsebastien.net/agentic-knowledge-management-the-next-evolution-of-pkm

These past few weeks, my OpenClaw agent has evolved from performing discrete tasks on autopilot to becoming a genuine operational partner.

What it's doing now:

Analyzes my stats across platforms (Ahrefs, Google Search Console, Medium, YouTube, Plausible, Gumroad, ...) and identifies what's actually working, what to adjust, etc
Manages my social media strategy by analyzing multiple years of data and telling me exactly which content formats drive engagement vs. which ones I should stop wasting time on
Prepares content drafts about concepts from my Concepts Website, my notes, my articles, etc. All while respecting my writing style
Monitors my business health with daily sales briefs, weekly summaries, and monthly reports
Keeps my knowledge base fresh by regularly re-indexing notes with qmd, cleaning up tags, etc
Submits PRs to my repositories (with proper identity and short-lived tokens), helping me implement features, add testimonials, etc
Runs everything on a schedule with versioned cron jobs

It doesn't just respond to requests anymore. It proactively surfaces insights I didn't know I needed.

For example, it analyzed my Typefully data and discovered that my resource-sharing posts (like Obsidian keyboard shortcuts) get 8-16% engagement and actual link clicks, while my quote tweets of popular accounts get 6K+ impressions but only 0.3% engagement. That's super useful to me. I wouldn't have found that pattern without dedicating hours to manual analysis.

AI agents are only as good as the knowledge systems they operate on. My notes, my documented processes, my writing style guidelines, my content strategy, my articles, my ideas, my goals, my plans, my projects, etc. All of it is in my vault. The agent doesn't guess. It knows.

This is what I mean by Agentic Knowledge Management (AKM). It's not just AI-assisted note-taking. It's AI agents that operate on your knowledge system to create, analyze, connect, and act.

And don't get me wrong. It's not about replacing my thinking. It's about enabling me to do more.

Obsidian CLI REST MCP: The Missing Bridge

The Obsidian CLI REST MCP plugin for Obsidian is a new plugin I've been working on. It's now the gateway between my AI agent and my knowledge base.

I built this plugin to solve a specific problem: how do you give AI agents running remotely (especially OpenClaw) structured access to your Obsidian vault without compromising security or control?

It exposes ALL the features of the Obsidian CLI, which currently only supports being used next to a running Obsidian instance, in different ways:

Model Context Protocol (MCP) server following Cloudflare's recommended pattern
Controlled vault access for AI agents and external tools (super efficient token-wise)
RESTful API with full OpenAPI documentation

It basically enables leveraging all the Obsidian CLI features remotely. Thanks to this, my OpenClaw agent can

Analyze/understand the vault structure
Suggest organizational improvements
Manipulate notes
Execute complex queries across your knowledge base. In particular, query Obsidian Bases
Explore/understand/update tags
Execute commands
List tags, orphaned notes, ...
Develop plugins
Access debugging tools
...

I've been running experiments all week, and the results are genuinely impressive. It's like giving AI Agents X-ray vision into your vault with surgical precision.

Most people treat their knowledge base as a static archive. With the Obsidian CLI, whether it's being used locally by Claude Code or whatever, or remotely through this plugin, it becomes a living system that AI can read, understand, and improve. No more copy-pasting content into chat interfaces. No more losing context between sessions. Just seamless integration.

And it goes far beyond "just" being able to manipulate the Markdown files. For instance, I can send voice messages to my AI Agent via WhatsApp or Discord, which get transcribed using the Knowii Voice AI CLI. Based on that, the agent can interact with my running Obsidian instance, create notes, open those, append content, etc. Anything I can do myself manually, AI can do for me. It's VERY powerful.

If you're using Claude Code, OpenClaw or similar tools and building AI workflows, this is worth exploring. The plugin is still early, but it's pretty cool.

Source code: https://github.com/dsebastien/obsidian-cli-rest
Documentation: https://developassion.gitbook.io/obsidian-cli-rest-mcp

CRM in Obsidian: Business Data Meets Knowledge Management

I've been tracking my business data in various tools for years: Gumroad for sales, spreadsheets for customers, random notes for context. It was fragmented, hard to query, and impossible to connect with the rest of my knowledge system.

So I decided I imported all my customer and sales data into Obsidian.

Now I have:

Person notes for every customer with purchase history, interaction context, and linked conversations
Product notes showing who bought what, when, and at what price point
Sales analytics powered by Obsidian Bases
Segment tracking with tags and properties
Automatic insights from my agent analyzing patterns, trends, issues, etc

Thanks to this, I can now ask questions like:

"Who are my top 10 customers by lifetime value?"
"Which products are most popular in Germany?"
"Show me everyone who bought the Obsidian Starter Kit in Q4 2025"

And I get instant answers, with full context, linked to my existing notes about those people, products, and conversations.

Your CRM shouldn't be separate from your knowledge management system. Your customers, your products, your conversations; they're all knowledge. When you integrate them into your vault, you unlock connections and insights that siloed tools can't provide.

I'm planning a detailed write-up on this setup. It's too good not to share.

Time Machine Plugin: Version Control for Notes

Speaking of new plugins, I released a first version of the Time Machine plugin for Obsidian this week.

The problem it solves:
Obsidian has a little known, but awesome file recovery feature. It automatically saves snapshots of your notes over time. The problem is that the UI/UX of that core plugin is far from great. You can't easily browse historical versions, compare changes, or restore specific sections. If you're managing a large vault with constant updates, you need better version control.

This plugin leverages the file recovery data (i.e., all the snapshots it creates when properly configured) and exposes those via a simple view in Obsidian, which you can pin to a side panel. Whenever a note is opened, the view adjust, and shows all the available snapshots for that note in a timeline. And it enables looking at the differences, restoring previous versions, and even restoring hunks of those previous versions (i.e., smaller sets of changes).

In addition, this plugin also supports Git, and combines both the file recovery snapshots and the git commit history for the current file in a single timeline, making it really easy to see the full history of your notes.

This plugin also shows the exact differences between each snapshot and the current note.

The goal of this plugin is NOT to take care of maintaining the history, but to enable easy recovery.

If you've ever lost a paragraph you wrote last week and wished you could just go back in time to grab it, this is for you.

I've already used it a few times to recover content I accidentally deleted. It paid for itself (in saved time and frustration) within the first week.

Source code: https://github.com/dsebastien/obsidian-time-machine
Documentation: https://developassion.gitbook.io/obsidian-time-machine/

Bookshelf plugin for Obsidian

I've also created a little prototype (that works great) to render collections of books in Obsidian as a bookshelf. It's called the Bookshelf plugin for Obsidian:

Source code: https://github.com/dsebastien/obsidian-bookshelf

Typefully Plugin News

I'm also working on v3 of the Typefully plugin for Obsidian. My goal is to add full support for Typefully within Obsidian. It already works great, but I want to add image uploading support, tag management, and more!

Concepts Website Progress

This week, during my train ride, I've added a cool graph view to the Concepts website:

There are now 2.8K concepts in there! Go explore new ideas!

Link: https://concepts.dsebastien.net/explore/

Random

My little Obsidian graph Reddit post ended up reaching 137K views, 1.2K upvotes, 116 comments
I used LangExtract on a set of interviews to extract qualitative data for a friend. And she told me I saved her weeks of work. That was a fun experiment; LangGraph is REALLY impressive!
I started publishing YouTube shorts on my channel: https://www.youtube.com/@dsebastien. More to come!
The Knowii Community has reached ~$500 MRR! ❤️🎉

When AI Stops Advising and Starts Working

These four projects, OpenClaw, Obsidian CLI REST MCP plugin for Obsidian, my new CRM system, and Time Machine plugin for Obsidian aren't separate experiments. They're parts of a larger shift I'm experimenting with in how I work.

For years, AI tools have been advisors. You ask a question, you get an answer. You ask for a draft, you get a draft. But the actual work; the execution, the iteration, the integration etc still fell on you.

That's changing.

With Agentic Knowledge Management (AKM), AI agents don't just advise. They operate. They analyze, create, connect, improve, and act on your knowledge system autonomously. And when you give them the right tools, they become much more capable operational partners.

Digital twins are now within reach when combining frontier AI models with frontier Knowledge Management practice!

The "Claws" aren't about control or dominance. They're about grip; the ability to actually hold onto and manipulate the work, not just observe it.

If you're a solo creator, knowledge worker, or anyone managing complex information, this shift is worth paying attention to. The tools are here. The frameworks exist. The only question is whether you're building the knowledge systems that can support them.

Consider that the pace of AI evolution keeps accelerating. The sooner you build a solid knowledge management practice, the more leverage you'll get.

Knowii News

The Knowii Community continues growing steadily. We're now at 385+ members 🎉

Thank you to everyone who's joined. Whether you're a Knowledge Explorer just starting out, a Knowledge Builder refining your systems, or a Knowledge Master helping others; you make this community what it is ❤️

Upcoming Workshops:
I'm preparing a series of workshops on AI + Obsidian integration, with a focus on Claude Desktop, Claude Code and practical workflows you can implement immediately. These aren't developer-only sessions. More details coming soon.

We're also discussing really cool stuff around AI evolutions, how to best combine AI and Knowledge Management, and a ton more!

If you're not in the community yet, now's a great time to join.

Join the Knowii Community:

LINK: https://www.store.dsebastien.net/product/knowii-community

Weekly Challenge

This week's challenge is about connecting the dots.

Pick one tool you use daily (could be your task manager, your calendar, your social media scheduler, your analytics platform). Now ask yourself:

What if this tool had full context about your knowledge base?
What questions could it answer that it can't right now?
What work could it do autonomously instead of requiring your constant input?

You don't need to build anything. Just imagine the possibilities. Awareness of the gap between "tool" and "system" is the first step toward closing it.

Latest Articles

Must-Have Obsidian Plugins for 2026

An updated guide to the essential plugins that make Obsidian truly powerful. I revisit my recommendations every year, and 2026 brought some surprises.

👉 Read it: Must Have Obsidian Plugins for 2026 (Article)

How to Self-Host OpenClaw Securely on a VPS

The complete security-focused guide to setting up your own AI agent on a VPS. Covers Tailscale, firewalls, SSH hardening, and the Least Privilege Principle.

👉 Read it: How to Self-Host OpenClaw Securely on a VPS (Article)

How to Give Your AI Agent Access to Your Chrome Browser (And Why You Should Be Scared)

Watching your AI agent control your Web browser is something that feels magical. It's also both very powerful and very risky. Here's how you can do it in a safe and controlled way.

👉 Read it: How to Connect OpenClaw to Chrome via Tailscale (Article)

Typefully Plugin for Obsidian v2

Announcement of the complete rewrite, now using the v2 API and Bun for builds. If you manage social media from Obsidian, this makes your life easier.

👉 Read it: Typefully plugin for Obsidian v2 (Article)

Quotes of the Week

A vision is like a dream. It will disappear unless we do something with it

People need to write more to think more clearly. But many think about it the other way around

Make mistakes, just don't make them permanent

The people who succeed are irrationally passionate about something

You make your own luck if you stay at it long enough

New & Interesting Links

PKM / Thinking / Learning

OpenClaw setup with Obsidian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdZUNwUwHIs
Claude Code + Obsidian = game over for many other PKM apps: https://www.youtube.com/live/UrRoa_J0yDQ
Obsidian Bases documentation updates
qmd semantic search improvements
Future of KM apps: https://x.com/evielync/status/2018816191155024183
Really interesting specification that I'm adding support for in the Obsidian Starter Kit: https://mdbase.dev
Obsidian and daily notes: https://medium.com/a-voice-in-the-conversation/obsidians-glue-daily-notes-4e8b9c8fa3c6
TaskNote now includes an MCP server, enabling AI agents to interact with Obsidian tasks programmatically: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8wgmWJHqpg
Obsidian is awesome for people with ADHD: https://www.xda-developers.com/i-finally-started-using-obsidian-and-i-regret-waiting-this-long/
Claudian: https://blog.wenhaofree.com/en/posts/articles/obsidian-claudian-integration-guide/
Book note taking workflow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UykMn0rHQvg
Content maps with bases: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o74ChaKxp8g
Eleanor Konik on Obsidian + Claude code: https://www.eleanorkonik.com/p/claude-obsidian-got-a-level-up

AI doesn't reduce work; it intensifies it: https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies-it
- https://steve-yegge.medium.com/the-ai-vampire-eda6e4f07163
Be careful with skills: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2otN_NY75Y
Built-in git worktree support in Claude Code: https://x.com/bcherny/status/2025007393290272904
Silicon AI: https://taalas.com/products/
Model Context Protocol (MCP) - Cloudflare's implementation pattern: https://blog.cloudflare.com/code-mode-mcp/
Learn RAG from scratch: https://github.com/langchain-ai/rag-from-scratch
Project Genie by Google: https://x.com/demishassabis/status/2016925155277361423. Playgrounds in Claude Code: https://x.com/trq212/status/2017024445244924382
You can now integrate LM Studio with Claude Code: https://lmstudio.ai/blog/claudecode
Lethal Trifecta for AI Agents
Prompt injection
BMad Method
Claude in Chrome
AI Coding Maturity Levels

Tools

NanoClaw - Little claws everywhere
LangExtract - Powerful tool to extract structured information from unstructured text with source grounding
Cryptomator - encrypted cloud storage
GitButler - virtual branches for Git
Cal.com - open source scheduling
TMux - Supercharge your terminal usage. Related: Termux
ebook2audiobook - Convert ebooks to audiobooks
VoiceBox - Clone your voice for free

Obsidian Plugins

Time Machine plugin for Obsidian - version control
Obsidian CLI REST MCP plugin for Obsidian - MCP integration
Bookshelf plugin for Obsidian - reading list management

Wow

https://www.humanconsumption.live

Go Further

Want to go deeper?