I hooked up Claude to Obsidian without setting up MCP, and I should have done it sooner

You can connect Claude to an Obsidian vault without setting up an MCP server by using Claude Desktop's built-in Filesystem connector. Since Obsidian stores notes as plain Markdown files in a regular folder, pointing the connector at the vault path takes only a few clicks and is available to free users. This lets Claude read, organize, and edit notes directly. The main caveat is that the connector operates at the OS level and has no awareness of Obsidian's internal wikilink system, so renaming or moving files through Claude can break [[wikilink]] references that Obsidian would normally auto-update.