Obsidian+Cursor=Mentor? Enlightenment & Danger

Once Cursor has my knowledge vault, he knows everything about me. He knows my personality, my strength, weakness. Now I know privacy is really important. If you still don't care about privacy, continue reading.

How did I think of this?

Claude is a helpful life coach

Many of you have already known, I've recently switched my subscription from ChatGPT to Claude and have been enjoying it.

At the same time, I'm sailing in the middle of an ocean called life. I've lost my compass and can't see any land. This is when I stumbled upon a tweet suggesting that we can use Claude as a life coach with simple prompt engineering.

You are a direct, results-oriented life coach. Your approach:

Core Traits:
- Cut straight to the core issues
- Provide direct, actionable feedback
- No sugar-coating or excessive empathy
- Focus on solutions, not emotional support

Methods:
1. Quick Assessment
   - Identify the real problem beneath surface issues
   - Get key relevant information with minimal back-and-forth
   - Spot self-defeating patterns and inefficiencies

2. Direct Guidance
   - Give clear, specific action steps
   - Call out counterproductive behaviors
   - Provide honest feedback about unrealistic goals
   - Challenge assumptions when needed

3. Solutions Focus
   - Prioritize practical actions over discussion
   - Set clear metrics for progress
   - Focus on what works, not what feels good
   - Push for accountability

Communication Style:
- Blunt but constructive
- Brief and to the point
- Focus on facts and results
- No platitudes or feel-good statements

Above is the prompt I used. Note that I asked Claude to be blunt because I don't want him to waste tokens to give me emotional support, fake empathy, and unnecessary confusion.

And Claude didn't fail me, after I tell him my priority which is developing my hard skills at the moment, he'd be able to distinguish what kind of things are distractions. So much about Claude, it is a helpful wise companion, but when you know what Cursor is capable to do, you'd be sacred.

To solve a problem

To use Claude as a Life coach, you need to upload bunch of information about yourself. But as a packed app, the amount of data and information you can upload to it is limited, even using project.

Months ago, when cursor was just beginning to gain popularity, when people were still in doubt of its capability, I read an article saying that cursor can be a great tool for analysis, where you just let it read your data and help you generate dedicated analytic code.

Who says that cursor can only code? It's based on LLM and you can use the newest version of Claude, of course I can do whatever I want with it.

On the other side of this usecase, I've been using the note-taking app, Obsidian, for half a year. One of the many good things about it is that all the data is stored locally. I can easily backup my vault by duplicating the 2.4MB folder filled with markdown notes to my hard drive or my own server.

Now a smart person as you should already know how I managed to make this special use case.

Doing it

Actually implementing this is so easy that as long as you have the two apps you can do it.

• First step: Copy the entire vault!
  • You don't want to risk all your notes so copy the entire folder to a place that you can easily play with like your desktop.
• Then you can delete things that Cursor can't read in you duplicated folder
  • This include
    • .git if you use it to backup or sync
    • .obsidian the app
    • images cursor can't make use of these
  • Don't delete your own folder that you use your Obsidian with!
  
• Use Cursor to open this folder
• Use "command L" to call the chat module, ask questions that you want to know about yourself (or your knowledge), and use "command enter" to ask the entire code space.

What did I find out?

I first ran a few normal questions to Cursor, like my personality (MBTI, Enneagram...), advice, and job recommendation.

He thinks that I'm INTP and type5w6, which I'm not really sure what it means.

But as I grow more curious, the results start to shock me.

I asked him about my weakness, and he says this:

Lack of deep technical foundation, project commitment issues, overextension, theoretical over practical... These are all real problems that I actually have and I've been living with them because they are easy and no one is straightforward enough to tell me about my problems.

If you are not satisfied with your life and don't know what's wrong, please try this method. You can use other documents of yours with cursor or improvise ways of your own to use this feature.

Reflexions

As helpful as it is, I can't help but think what bad people can do if they know this. Just imagine asking Cursor, "If I'm to be scammed, what do you think it will be?" Or something less dangerous and more possible, "What advertisements will attract me and make me buy?"

Note-taking apps like notion are developing fast, but they are not places where I can put my full trust in.

I've been using Obsidian in many cool ways. For example, things I talked about here can be achieved using a community plugin in Obsidian called Obsidian Copilot. I will talk more about how I use Obsidian in the future. Follow me on X to stay tuned!