Obsidian is the most popular way to give an agent a persistent, human-readable memory. Instead of an opaque vector store, the agent works in a folder of plain-Markdown notes — the same vault you read and edit yourself. It can orient itself at the start of a session, traverse links between notes, and write discoveries back so the next run starts smarter.
This is why it's a staple of the knowledge-management category on both frameworks: it's the rare skill that's useful to the agent and directly useful to you.
Obsidian on OpenClaw
OpenClaw ships an official Obsidian skill in its core skill set. It drives an existing vault through the Obsidian command-line tool — reading, searching, creating, and editing notes, tasks, links, properties, and even plugin data. You install it from ClawHub like any other skill:
openclaw skills install obsidianPoint it at your vault path and the agent can now answer questions from your notes and append what it learns. Because it's an official skill, it stays current with OpenClaw's skill protocol and shows up in the registry with version history and community feedback.
Obsidian on Hermes
Hermes approaches the same problem from its memory-first design. You add Obsidian as a skill and let the agent own a vault folder — often ~/wiki on the server. The agent writes notes there while you browse the same vault in the Obsidian app on your laptop or phone, and changes appear within seconds. Community packages like kepano/obsidian-skills (from Obsidian's own CEO) round out full read-write access.
A nice consequence of Hermes' built-in learning loop: the notes it writes to Obsidian become raw material its Curator can later distil into reusable skills. Your vault becomes both your knowledge base and a staging area for the agent's self-improvement.
OpenClaw vs Hermes at a glance
- OpenClaw — official skill, CLI-driven, installed from ClawHub. Explicit and predictable.
- Hermes — vault-as-folder, near-real-time sync, feeds the native learning loop.
Either way you end up with the same thing developers keep coming back for: an agent whose memory you can actually open, read, and correct.
Running it from your phone
The vault lives on whatever server runs the agent, so you reach it over SSH. OpenClaw and Hermes both run headless on a VPS, Mac mini, or Raspberry Pi — and Onepilot gives you the SSH terminal to manage them from an iPhone, with Obsidian Mobile open alongside to watch the notes update.