IAN'S AI THOUGHTSTREAM THOUGHTSTREAM / #youtube
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2026·07·16 19:24 / 3 MIN

Obsidian and Claude Code Assistant

All my notes live in one directory. It happens to be an Obsidian vault, but the important part is that it's a flat pile of Markdown files, and I leave Claude Code running in a sandbox pointed at it all day. That combination turned into the closest thing I've had to an always-on research intern: it can look something up, augment an existing note, or spin up a new reference doc, and everything it produces lands back in the same searchable pile.

I'm not a heavy Obsidian user and never have been. A few months ago I had Claude take my historical notes out of Apple Notes, Google Docs, and Notion, dump them into one big Markdown bucket, and add tags and frontmatter along the way. Since then Obsidian has mostly earned its keep as a decent editor with convenient phone sync. The agent does the interesting work.

The setup

Claude Code runs under nono in what you might call YOLO mode, or bypass-all-permissions. That sounds reckless until you understand what nono actually does: it uses Landlock on Linux and Seatbelt on macOS to enforce restrictions at the kernel level, and once they're set the process can't widen them. No escape hatch, not even for nono itself. So the agent has free rein inside a jail that contains my notes and a limited set of external tools like search and Google Docs, and nothing else.

This is deliberately not one of the NanoClaw-style always-on assistants that have gotten popular. Those come with real risk. Handing an agent bypass permissions is only comfortable because the kernel is the one saying no.

The recipe test

Here's what convinced me. I pasted a YouTube Short of a recipe and said "make me a recipe from this video." I also told it to grab the transcript with yt-dlp if it could.

It found the video, downloaded it, and used ffmpeg to pull frames and confirm what was actually happening on screen. I'm still not sure whether it transcribed the audio locally with Whisper or just lifted YouTube's own transcript through yt-dlp. Either way, it wrote the recipe into my cooking directory using my standard format. Later I pulled it up on my phone while making dinner.

Browser window displaying a recipe page for burrata toast with roasted tomatoes on a dark background
Browser window displaying a recipe page for burrata toast with roasted tomatoes on a dark background

Remote control closes the loop

Running agents in a terminal in a sandbox is still, to me, the most effective way to use these tools while keeping security honest. The problem has always been reaching that terminal from the couch. SSH from a phone works, technically, but it's miserable.

Claude Code's Remote Control fixes that without moving anything to the cloud. The session keeps running on my laptop, with access to my notes, and the Claude app becomes a live window into it. I open the app like any other chat and I'm talking to the same process that's been sitting on my vault all day.

It isn't a person, and I don't want it to be. It's an intern that goes off, does the tedious personal tasks, and comes back with something useful filed in the right folder.

2026·05·22 20:12 / 2 MIN

Mentions Are the New Backlinks

Ahrefs analyzed 75,000 brands and found that mentions, not backlinks, correlate most strongly with showing up in ChatGPT, AI Mode, and AI Overviews. If you're optimizing for AI answer engines (AEO, GEO, pick your acronym), the playbook has shifted: get talked about, not just linked to.

The study used Spearman correlation across millions of AI responses. Branded web mentions land between 0.66 and 0.71. Raw backlink counts and URL rating barely move the needle. Number of site pages is essentially noise at ~0.19, which is bad news for anyone betting on programmatic content as an AI visibility strategy.

YouTube punches above its weight

The surprise: YouTube mentions correlate at ~0.737, beating every other factor across all three AI surfaces. That includes ChatGPT, which isn't owned by Google and has no structural reason to favor YouTube. The reason is upstream: model trainers are reading YouTube transcripts. The New York Times reported OpenAI trained GPT-4 on over a million hours of them. Google has done the same for its own models.

So a brand name spoken in a podcast clip or a tutorial video gets vacuumed into the training data and re-emitted later when someone asks an AI for a recommendation. Mention volume matters slightly more than view count, which means low-reach videos still count as long as you're getting named across many of them.

What this changes

Backlinks aren't worthless. They still matter for classic search. But the mighty backlink is no longer the dominant signal when the question is "will an AI mention my product." Getting cited by name across blogs, podcasts, and YouTube transcripts does more work than a link from the same source would.

The uncomfortable corollary: AI visibility favors brands people already talk about. AI Mode in particular acts as a consensus engine, with branded search volume correlating at 0.466. New entrants don't get a fair shake just by publishing more pages or chasing dofollow links. They get a shake by being mentioned, in plain text, in places models read.