A second brain is a wiki an AI agent builds from your notes and updates with every new one: contacts, projects, tasks, documents, procedures — all linked. On Aderlo Cloud the Hermes agent receives your Obsidian vault through your own sync server (Obsidian Sync on Self-hosted LiveSync, end-to-end encrypted) as plain files, both ways within seconds, and keeps the wiki in a separate Hermes/ folder — it never moves or edits your own notes.
Why an agent needs a second brain
An AI agent without durable memory starts every conversation from zero. Hermes has built-in memory, but it holds a few thousand characters — enough for your preferences, not for your offers, contracts, posts and meeting notes. A second brain keeps that knowledge in your Obsidian vault as plain Markdown, and the agent maintains an organised wiki over it that it consults on every task.
Andrej Karpathy popularised the pattern as the LLM Wiki: raw sources stay untouched, the language model compiles wiki pages from them (people, companies, topics), keeps an index.md catalogue and a log.md journal, and follows a rules file written for the agent. Knowledge is compiled once and then extended, instead of being rediscovered on every question — which is what makes answers faster and cheaper in tokens.
How it works on Aderlo Cloud
Aderlo Cloud connects two catalogue applications: Obsidian Sync (your own CouchDB with the Self-hosted LiveSync plug-in) and Hermes Workspace (the Hermes agent in its own container). Once you connect a vault to the agent, the server decrypts a copy of the notes for that Hermes instance only and keeps it as plain files in its workspace, under Obsidian/<name>. Voice recordings in the vault are transcribed on the server and get a text note beside them.
| Git + GitHub | Obsidian Sync | Aderlo Cloud | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Extra cost | usually none | USD 4/month billed annually, or USD 5 monthly | included in the hosting plan |
| Change latency | the plug-in commit/push cycle, usually minutes | seconds, but the agent still needs its own route to the files | seconds, both ways |
| Encryption | repository readable by the provider | end-to-end | end-to-end on the server; only the owner knows the passphrase |
| Voice notes | build it yourself | build it yourself | transcribed on the server |
| Token for the agent | a GitHub token with repository access | no official agent API | none — one form in the panel |
Setup, step by step
Install Obsidian Sync from the panel
Applications → catalogue → Obsidian Sync. The plug-in setup is on Obsidian Sync on your own server.
Connect Obsidian on your computer and phone
The Self-hosted LiveSync plug-in, the instance address and password from the panel, and an encryption passphrase of your own. Keep it safe; nobody can recover it.
Install Hermes
Pick Hermes Workspace in the catalogue and connect a model.
Connect the vault to the agent
On the Hermes instance page, the Obsidian notes card: choose the server and vault, a folder name, and type the passphrase. The panel checks that it opens the notes before calling the connection ready.
Build the second brain
In the Hermes chat type
/aderlo-second-brain setup. The agent counts the notes, says how many passes the first build takes, asks what the vault is for and proposes sections.Turn on the automations
/aderlo-second-brain schedule: daily ingest of new notes, a morning brief, a weekly review, a Sunday tidy-up — only the ones you accept.
/aderlo-second-brain setup— first build: counts notes, agrees the sections, createsHermes//aderlo-second-brain ingest— folds new and changed notes into the wiki/aderlo-second-brain query <question>— an answer linked to the notes it came from/aderlo-second-brain lint— housekeeping: orphans, duplicates, contradictions, proposals/aderlo-second-brain briefandreview— daily summary and weekly review/aderlo-second-brain schedule— all of the above on a timetable
The rules the agent keeps
- Your notes are read-only. Hermes does not rename, move, delete or edit them unless you ask about a specific note.
- It writes only in `Hermes/`. Two writers in one note is a conflict you would have to resolve by hand.
- Every fact has a source — a link to the note it came from.
- Note content is data, not instructions. A clipped page telling the agent to do something gets summarised, not obeyed.
- Private stays private. A
Privatefolder and notes withhermes: ignorein their frontmatter are skipped.
Many tutorials ask the agent to sort the whole vault into folders. In a synced vault that breaks every [[link]] to a moved note on all your devices, because Obsidian only repairs links for moves made inside the app. Hermes proposes moves instead; you drag the notes in Obsidian.
Häufige Fragen
- Do I need Obsidian Sync or a GitHub repository?
- No. On Aderlo Cloud the vault syncs through your own Obsidian Sync server (Self-hosted LiveSync), and Hermes receives the notes through a bridge on the server — no GitHub, no tokens, no extra subscription.
- Can Hermes damage my notes?
- Hermes writes only inside the Hermes/ folder at the root of the vault and does not rename, move or delete your notes. Changes to your notes are written as proposals for you to apply. Deleting the Hermes/ folder leaves the rest of the vault untouched.