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Chapter 01 · 6 min

The morning-brief agent

You spend 30–45 minutes most mornings grazing feeds to find the five things that actually matter to your work. This course builds an agent that does that pass for you overnight: it searches the web on your topics, has Claude synthesise the noise into a short brief, and drops that brief into your Obsidian vault, so you open one note instead of twelve tabs.

“A good chief of staff doesn't hand you the whole newspaper. They read it before you wake up and leave one page on your desk.”

What you're building

The deliverable is a single dated markdown note that appears in your notes vault every morning, say 2026-05-25 Brief.md, containing a ranked, de-duplicated, cited summary of what happened in the areas you told it to watch. No app to open, no feed to scroll: the brief is just there when you start work.

Four roles make that happen, and it helps to name them before wiring anything: a scheduler that wakes the whole thing up on a clock, web search that acts as the agent's eyes, a synthesis step where Claude turns raw results into judgement, and an output step that writes the note where you'll actually read it.

  SCHEDULER        WEB SEARCH         SYNTHESIS          OUTPUT
  (every 7am)      (the eyes)         (the judgement)    (where you read)
  ----------       ----------         ----------         ----------
  n8n        -->   Brave Search  -->  Claude        -->  Obsidian vault
  Schedule         API / MCP          (Messages API      (Filesystem MCP
  Trigger                              or n8n node)        or n8n file write)
The four roles and the two tools we'll use for each.

Two honest ways to assemble it

The original stack is often quoted as "Claude + n8n + Brave + Filesystem MCP → Obsidian," which blends two things that actually solve the same problems in different ways. It's worth separating them, because copying both at once is where most people get stuck.

  • The MCP assembly (interactive). You add a Brave Search server and a Filesystem server to Claude Desktop. Now Claude itself can search the web and write to your vault when you ask it to. Great for understanding the pieces, but Claude Desktop doesn't run on a schedule, so this path is hands-on.
  • The n8n assembly (automated). n8n's Schedule Trigger fires every morning, calls the Brave Search API for your topics, sends the results to Claude via the Anthropic API, and writes the note into your vault folder. This is the unattended "while you sleep" version.

If you only want the result and don't care about the interactive version, you can skim Chapter 3 and spend your time on Chapter 4, but the MCP setup is the cheapest way to confirm your Brave key and vault path work before you automate anything.

In one line each

  • Goal: one dated markdown note in your vault each morning (ranked, de-duplicated, cited) instead of 30–45 minutes of feed-grazing.
  • Four roles: scheduler (n8n), web search (Brave), synthesis (Claude), output (your vault).
  • Two assemblies: MCP/interactive via Claude Desktop, and n8n/automated via the Anthropic API. They overlap; build MCP first to validate, then automate with n8n.

Where to go next