Obsidian
Give your Obsidian vault an agent that actually knows your notes, powered by Hindsight. The plugin syncs your vault into a Hindsight bank and adds a chat panel whose answers are grounded on your notes — and cite them.
Why this matters
Obsidian is where your knowledge lives. Vector-search plugins can find related notes, but they can't reason across them, remember what you asked, or keep a running synthesis as your vault grows. Hindsight adds that layer:
- Recall is faster and more accurate than text search.
- Reflect reasons over your whole vault to answer a question, and shows the notes it used.
- Mental models (on the roadmap) keep living summaries of your vault that refresh as you write.
Source of truth stays in Obsidian
A hard rule of this integration: Hindsight never becomes a second source of truth. Sync is one-way (Obsidian → Hindsight), every answer cites the note it came from so you can fix things at the source, and chat conversations are not stored by default. Edit a note, and Hindsight reconverges on the next sync.
What it does
- Incremental vault sync — notes are retained as Hindsight documents. Edits upsert, deletes remove. A content hash means unchanged notes are skipped.
- Implicit scoping — every note is auto-tagged on ingest with its vault, folder (and sub-folders), and created/updated dates. You never think about scope until you recall — then filter by any combination via Hindsight's
tag_groups. Multiple vaults share one bank and stay separable by theirvault:tag. - Same data from UI and API — the Obsidian chat panel and your automations (n8n, Hermes, …) hit the same bank with the same tags, so they see the same scoped view.
- Grounded chat — a side panel that answers questions over your notes via Reflect, with collapsible citations (click to open the source note) and a reasoning disclosure.
- Manual or automatic — sync on every edit, or run Sync vault now on demand.
Scoping
Recall/reflect (from the UI or an API call) can filter by any combination of:
| Dimension | Tag(s) |
|---|---|
| Vault | vault:<name> |
| Folder (+ ancestors) | folder:Work, folder:Work/Clients |
| Date | created:2026-03, updated:2026-06 |
Your own frontmatter tags/aliases are carried through too.
Installation
✨ Recommended: Hindsight Cloud — sign up free, get an API key, and skip self-hosting.
While the plugin is in beta it installs via BRAT: add the repository vectorize-io/hindsight-obsidian (the dedicated plugin repo BRAT installs from) and enable it in Settings → Community plugins.
Self-hosting alternative — run Hindsight locally:
pip install hindsight-all
export HINDSIGHT_API_LLM_API_KEY=your-openai-key
hindsight-api
Configuration
Open Settings → Hindsight:
| Setting | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
| API URL | https://api.hindsight.vectorize.io | Hindsight server (use http://localhost:8888 for self-hosted) |
| API key | — | Hindsight Cloud API key |
| Bank name | obsidian | Shared bank for all vaults (separated by vault: tags) |
| Include / exclude folders | — | Limit which notes sync |
| Sync on edit | on | Re-ingest notes automatically as you edit |
| Default chat depth | low | Reflect budget for chat answers |
| Remember conversations | off | When on, chat turns are stored in Hindsight (creates memory outside your vault) |
Commands
- Sync vault now — full reconcile (ingest changed notes, prune deleted ones).
- Ingest current note — force-sync the active note.
- Open chat — open the grounded chat panel.
Headless / CLI ingestion (no desktop app)
Running your vault on an always-on server (kept current on disk by Obsidian Sync)? The same ingestion runs without the Obsidian app via the hindsight-obsidian-sync CLI, shipped in the same package. It drives the same sync engine as the plugin, so it produces identical document ids, scope tags, and prune-ownership — a vault can be synced from a server and later opened interactively elsewhere without the two ingesters fighting or duplicating documents.
npm install -g @vectorize-io/hindsight-obsidian
# one-shot reconcile (cron-friendly)
hindsight-obsidian-sync reconcile \
--vault ~/Vaults/Brain --bank my-vault \
--api-url https://api.hindsight.vectorize.io --api-token hsk_...
# or keep it running and sync changes live
hindsight-obsidian-sync reconcile --vault ~/Vaults/Brain --bank my-vault --watch
--api-url / --api-token fall back to HINDSIGHT_API_URL / HINDSIGHT_API_TOKEN. Other flags: --include / --exclude (repeatable), --vault-name, --prefix-doc-id, and --index.
The sync index (the CLI's equivalent of the plugin's data.json) defaults to ~/.hindsight/obsidian/<vault>.json — deliberately outside the vault so Obsidian Sync never propagates it. If you run the CLI and the plugin against the same bank and vault, keep their scope settings identical (include/exclude, vault name, prefix-doc-id): each keeps its own index and a reconcile prunes only what its own index tracks, so mismatched scope could let one delete documents the other owns.