Connecting a provider
A provider supplies the models the agent runs on. Smart Second Brain is provider-agnostic — you bring your own, and you can configure several at once and switch between them per chat.
Add one under Settings → Smart Second Brain → Providers → Add provider.
Supported providers
Section titled “Supported providers”| Provider | Runs locally | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Ollama | Yes | Fully local. Nothing leaves your machine. |
| oMLX | Yes | Local inference on Apple Silicon. |
| OpenAI | No | Also covers OpenAI Codex sign-in. |
| Anthropic | No | Claude models. |
| OpenRouter | No | Routes to many vendors behind one key. |
| OpenAI-compatible | Depends | Any endpoint speaking the OpenAI API. |
You can create multiple instances of the same provider type with distinct display names and endpoints — useful for separating a work key from a personal one, or pointing at two different self-hosted endpoints.
Local setup with Ollama
Section titled “Local setup with Ollama”- Install Ollama and start it.
- Pull a chat model and an embedding model:
ollama pull llama3.1 && ollama pull mxbai-embed-large- In plugin settings, add an Ollama provider. The default base URL is
http://localhost:11434.
Local providers are treated as trusted by default, since no data leaves the machine.
Cloud setup
Section titled “Cloud setup”Add the provider, paste your API key, and select a model. Keys are held in Obsidian’s secret storage — the plugin’s config file stores only a reference, never the raw key.
Cloud providers are untrusted by default, which means they are blocked from reading, embedding, or receiving any note you’ve marked private. See the Privacy model.
Choosing a model
Section titled “Choosing a model”Use the most capable model your provider offers — agent quality depends heavily on reasoning and tool-use ability. Frontier cloud models give the best results. For a fully local setup, pair a capable Ollama chat model with a strong embedding model.