Transcription
When most people use tools like Claude Co-work or Codeex, they build a static system, something they have to constantly feed before it gets any smarter. But there's a way to build a knowledge base that improves itself. One that proactively gets smarter every single day without you having to do the work. Mine, for instance, forms connections between all my scattered ideas every night while I'm sleeping. And that has led to real breakthroughs in my business and in my health and has turned my agent into a true AI system that's more powerful than anything you could go out and buy. And here's the best part. This doesn't need some advanced model that hasn't come out yet or some tool you've never heard of. Using Claude Co-work or OpenAI's codeex and a simple system of files on your computer, you can build a self-improving system like this in a matter of minutes. Let me show you exactly how.
This idea originally came from Andre Cararpathy, one of the most respected people in AI. He calls it an LLM wiki, but I like to think of it more as a map for your AI. Normally, every time you point your AI at the files on your computer, it has to read through all of them and figure out what they are and how they fit together before it can help you. Then a week later, if you ask it to do something else for you, it has to do that whole process over again. So, it never remembers and it never gets faster. A map fixes that. Instead of a messy pile of files, your AI gets a clean map of everything, you know, with all the connections already drawn in. So, it doesn't have to figure out your system every time you chat with it. It just looks at this map and knows instantly what it needs and where it lives.
Now, this looks a little bit intimidating, but the best part is your AI will build and maintain this automatically for you. You just have to use your system normally and then every night it will look at what you've created and find where it fits on this map, what other files you've created in the past that connect with it. And as it begins to form these connections, it will get smarter and gain more context about you and the kind of things you turn to it for.
So for example, this is my knowledge base right here. It's all contained inside this folder called knowledge. You can see inside of this I have a section for important people. I have a section for sponsors I've worked with for all the tools I've covered on my channel for different topics I'm interested in. A lot of this information comes from transcripts of my YouTube videos. But it's also articles, tweets, or other YouTube videos from other creators that I found online that I think are interesting that I've added to this knowledge base and then my AI has organized for me. To understand this better, we can click on index right here, which is essentially a table of contents for my entire knowledge base. Now, I don't use this table of contents. This is specifically for my AI. So, it knows its way around this knowledge base. You can see right here, I have sections for the different tools I cover, the topics, the sponsors, and all the people that I've talked with that I want to keep track of. If we come into the tools section for instance, you can see I've covered chat GBT cla and Gemini. If I open up one of these, you can see all of the YouTube videos I've made on Gemini, all the articles I've saved and how they all connect together. And this isn't just taking the raw transcripts or the raw articles and throwing them in here. It's actually looking for connections and it's building up this information base as to what is important about Gemini for me, for Paul. So that way the next time I ask a question about Gemini or making a video about it, it can come in here and see what is important for me that it may want to include in the answers it gives me or when it's helping me put together a future video.
And it's not just for work either. You can also use this for personal projects or personal things you have going on in your life. I run a second one of these knowledge bases. For instance, for my health, I track things like how well I'm sleeping, how many calories I'm eating, my weight, my resting heart rate, and my HRV. And it gives me this little score telling me how ready I am when I start my day. So, all of this goes into daily pages, and then it organizes it all for me. So, now I can chat with this folder and ask it things like, "How well is my progress going towards my goals?" And it already has all of this information. It's already formed these connections and it already knows what's important to me. So, it's going to surface that information for me quickly.
What I want you to understand about this is once you learn how to set it up, you can point this at any area of your life. So, your business, fitness, a topic you're researching, a hobby, the setup is identical. You put stuff in, the AI organizes it, creates a map for itself once, and automatically keeps it updated so it can give you the most relevant, helpful answers as quickly as possible. Let's start setting this up.
You may have noticed that I've been using this app right here to visualize and show you my knowledge base. This app is called Obsidian. It's free to download and I suggest that you do download it and use it as a way to view your knowledge base. When you first set it up, it will ask you to create a new vault. A vault is just a fancy word for a folder on your computer. So, click on create and name your vault. So, maybe knowledge base. Choose a location where you want that folder saved and then click on create. Over here on the left, you'll be able to see all the files inside your folder, which right now is only one file that says welcome, but you can always add new files. So, since I saved my vault to my desktop, you can see right here that this is literally just a folder. And what I'll do is I will drag in all these notes that I had previously made that I want as part of that knowledge base. So now inside of Obsidian, you can see I have all these new notes inside my knowledge base folder.
What you want to start doing now is adding things to your knowledge base as time goes on. So if you have any new ideas, you can click on new note here and just type out your idea right here. Or you can add articles. So there's a free Chrome extension called Obsidian Web Clipper. And with this installed, if you're reading an article that you want to save or even a YouTube video, you can click on the Chrome extension, click add to Obsidian, and it'll be added to your vault as part of your knowledge base that can then be processed by your AI, which again, I'll show you how to do that in just a minute.
Next, you want to pick the tool that you're going to use for your knowledge base management. I use Claude Co-work for that. With Claude Co-work, you can point it to folders on your computer. So, it'll be able to access all the files inside of it. So, if I click right here on this dropdown and click on choose a different folder, I can then go to my desktop where my knowledge base is, select that folder, and click on open. So, now it has access to all the files in that folder. I can also click on the left here where it says customize. Then click on connectors. And clicking on this plus icon, I can browse all the connectors to see all the thirdparty tools that Claude works with. Claude lets you talk to other apps directly. Things like your email, your calendar, notion, and that means all those tools can become part of your knowledge base, too. And you don't have to actually drop files into the folder by hand. It can pull the information from these other apps. But the problem is Co-work doesn't connect to every tool out there. There are thousands of apps and only some of them are available as connectors. So if the thing you want to feed into your knowledge base lives in an app that co-work can't reach, you're stuck copying and pasting it by hand. There is a tool that fixes that though, and that's Zapier, who's also the sponsor of today's video. You probably know Zapier as a tool that connects all your different apps together. But Zapier also has an MCP that connects Claude Co-work to thousands of other apps that it doesn't natively have access to. So even if those tools can't talk to Claude Co-work on their own, Zapier connects almost all of them and it gives Claude way more power inside of the apps it does connect to. Here's how it works. Head over to the link in the description down below and sign up for a free account if you don't already have one with Zapier. Then click on the left where it says MCP servers and click on new MCP server. From here you'll select Claude Co-work or if you're using another tool, you can select any of these other tools. And if it doesn't ask you to connect to Claude Co-work, click on connect here. Click on add to Claude and then click on connect. Then click on apps and add the ones that you want your AI to have access to through the Zapier MCP. The best part is you get granular permissions so you can make sure that you only give your AI access to the tools and features that you feel comfortable with. This is huge for a knowledge base because the more places your AI can pull from, the richer your knowledge base gets. I've got mine hooked up so Claude can pull straight from apps that don't even have built-in connectors. things like my YouTube account for instance and every night it can pull information from that and add it to my knowledge base and the map. Zapier MCP is the thing that took my setup from a folder I feed by hand to a system that pulls from everywhere I work. If you want to try it out, a link is in the description down below. And big thanks to Zapier for sponsoring this video.
Once you have all this context in your knowledgebased folder, you now need to create this system that will connect all of these ideas together. build out the index, that map, and give your AI the ability to self-improve. And the best part is your AI is going to do all of that for you. Down in the description of this video, I will have a link to this Google doc that has a prompt in it. All you have to do is copy this prompt down and come over to the tool you're using, like Claude Co-work. Point it at the folder that contains your knowledge base, paste in the prompt, and send it to Claude. Co-work is now getting to work organizing my new knowledge base and building out the map for it. It'll sort through the knowledge into folders. If you already have folders in there, it'll use those ones. And it'll of course never do anything without your permission first. So here it's actually putting together the plan and asking me to approve it. Since I'm happy with this, I'll say yes, all as proposed. And then it's asking me where that map should live, the index. And I'll say inside the wiki, which is recommended. So in addition to organizing the files, it's creating that wiki folder we talked about. That's the place where your map's going to live. And then it's going to start forming all those connections and putting together the index and the entire system so it can self-improve. And the last thing it will do is set up a schedule task. So, every night, the AI will automatically check the folder for anything new you've added and fold it into the map for you. All you have to do is approve that. I'll say I wanted to run at 2:00 a.m. every day. And then it will allow me to schedule that.
So, returning back to Obsidian, we can see now that all of those files are now organized into these subfolders. So, here is the wiki one. Here are all the sources. Here is the review file. So, all of that has been done and created for you. You didn't have to do any of this yourself. And here's your own index, which again is like that table of contexts. So, this is what it will read in order to be able to figure out where everything lives for you.
Once it's set up, there's really nothing special or specific you have to do or say for your AI to take advantage of that knowledge base. It will on its own just pull information from it when necessary to help answer your questions. So, let's say you're working with a client and you start chatting with co-work about that client. If it has access to that knowledge base, it may be able to recognize that you went through a similar problem with another client in the past and that the resolution that you came to with that client might help you with this new one. All of that will just happen naturally, but you could always ask it to look for patterns. You could say things like, "What patterns have you noticed with my thinking lately?" or if there's any missed opportunities, can you find those for me? Any uh revenue streams that I may be missing out on based on what you know about me? You know, types of questions like that. And it does a really good job of finding those things for you and all those different connections.
I want to highlight for you two different ways that I've been using this in addition to just having a knowledge base of all my different ideas. So, first I have this business journal. I can't really show you this because it does have some personal thoughts in there, but just every few days I journal with Claude Co-work and we'll explain to it what's been on my mind with my business and where I feel like I'm struggling and where I'm doing well. And it pulls all that into this business journal. We chat back and forth and then it kind of creates a summary of everything that we've talked about. And at the end, one thing it's prompted to do automatically is to find connections between what I've talked about in this session of the journaling process with past journaling entries that I've made. So, it's really helpful for kind of staying on top of my business. The other one I've put together is this health knowledge base. This is what I'm using to track my workouts, how my body's reacting to different types of foods, different calorie intakes I have every single day, even the amount of water that I'm drinking. And it's all represented in this nice dashboard. I'll have prompts for both this health dashboard I've put together and knowledge base and the business journaling one down below if you want to copy those and use those for your own knowledge bases.
So that's it. A knowledge base that builds itself and maintains itself. It's the single most useful thing I've set up with Claude Co-work and it takes less than 50 minutes. I think you'll see that once you set it up and start feeding it your knowledge, your AI assistant will become much more powerful than ever before.
Now, if you've made it this far in the video, it means you must have liked something about it. So, do me a favor, give this video a thumbs up and subscribe to my channel because I always release tutorials like this one. If you don't want to miss out on them, definitely make sure you are subscribed. Otherwise, thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video. Bye for now.