# i'd like you to help me get this set up, please. Please make extra sure you unde ## Retrieval Notes - Session id: `c3b2d8ab-991c-4061-a715-71e36a36021e` - Last activity: `2026-03-16T12:35:09.791Z` - Files touched: `1` ## Artifacts **Created:** - `/Users/nickyoung/.claude/plans/snug-bouncing-ember.md` ## My Notes <!-- Add your notes here. This section is preserved across syncs. --> ## Conversation ### User i'd like you to help me get this set up, please. Please make extra sure you understand what you're doing before. Well, have a look, make you sure you understand what's going on. Uh, and then get back to me with a plan of what you'll do next. Don't make any changes. Open-source Projects Home Bookmarks Sponsors Newsletter RSS Home / Project Details The definitive tool for building AI agents inside Obsidian GitHub Repo March 15, 2026 at 04:25 PM 2.6k The definitive tool for building AI agents inside Obsidian @githubprojects Post Author Project Description 2 Posts ID: 802e6bcf-1b9b-44c4-a9d7-239ede061fde View on GitHub Build AI Agents Inside Your Obsidian Vault with Obsidian Skills If you use Obsidian for note-taking, you've probably felt the potential bubbling under the surface. It's more than a markdown editor; it's a personal knowledge base. Now, imagine if that knowledge base could act on its own—summarizing content, generating ideas, or organizing your notes autonomously. That's the promise of Obsidian Skills. This new plugin, developed by @kepano, is being called the definitive tool for building AI agents inside Obsidian. It moves beyond simple AI chat prompts and turns your vault into a platform for creating persistent, task-oriented assistants that live right where your thoughts are. What It Does Obsidian Skills is an Obsidian.md plugin that provides a framework for creating and managing AI "skills." Think of a skill as a specialized agent with a specific job. It can be given access to certain notes, folders, or data sources within your vault, and then programmed (via natural language instructions and settings) to perform tasks like content generation, analysis, or organization. You're not just asking an AI a one-off question. You're deploying a semi-autonomous helper that understands the context of your vault and can be triggered manually or automatically. Why It's Cool The implementation is what makes this stand out. Instead of a monolithic AI feature, it's a flexible framework. Developers and technically-inclined users can create their own skills, tailoring AI behavior to their exact workflow. Some compelling use cases already emerging: Auto-Summarizer: A skill that watches a specific folder for new meeting notes and generates concise summaries. Research Assistant: An agent that can analyze a collection of research notes and propose connections or outline a literature review. Content Generator: A skill that takes a rough note with bullet points and turns it into a draft blog post, using your existing writing as a style guide. Vault Organizer: An agent that suggests tags, links, or folder locations for new notes based on your existing structure. It cleverly uses Obsidian's existing plugin architecture and metadata, meaning these agents operate with a deep awareness of your knowledge graph. The skills are persistent—their instructions and target data are saved, so you can run them again anytime. How to Try It Prerequisites: You'll need Obsidian and an OpenAI API key (or another compatible LLM provider). Install the Plugin: The plugin is in beta. You can install it via the Community Plugins tab in Obsidian by searching for "Skills," or manually install it from the GitHub repository. Visit the GitHub Repo: All the details, documentation, and source code are available at github.com/kepano/obsidian-skills. This is where you'll find setup instructions and, importantly, examples of skills to install and modify. Start Simple: Begin by adding a pre-made skill from the repo's examples. Configure it with your API key, point it at a test folder, and see how it works. Then, try editing its instructions to change its behavior. Final Thoughts Obsidian Skills feels like a natural and powerful evolution for the app. It taps into the core idea of Obsidian—that your notes are interconnected data—and gives that data a new way to be processed and utilized. For developers, it's an exciting playground to build contextual AI tools without starting from scratch. For power users, it's a path to a truly intelligent second brain. The barrier to entry isn't zero—you need to be comfortable with Obsidian and have some API keys handy—but the payoff is a level of automation and AI integration that's deeply personalized. It's less about flashy AI and more about building useful, repeatable processes. Follow for more interesting projects: @githubprojects 📧 Did you like this read? Join our newsletter and you will get weekly top stories like this delivered to your inbox. No spam etc. Join our weekly newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter to get the latest updates on open-source projects. Your email address Join 10k+ developers already joined Repository: https://github.com/kepano/obsidian-skills GitHub - kepano/obsidian-skills: Agent skills for Obsidian. Teach your agent to use Markdown, Bases, JSON Canvas, and use the CLI. GitHub - kepano/obsidian-skills: Agent skills for Obsidian. Teach your agent to use Markdown, Bases, JSON Canvas, and use the CLI. Agent skills for Obsidian. Teach your agent to use Markdown, Bases, JSON Canvas, and use the CLI. - kepano/obsidian-skills GitHub - kepano/obsidian-skills: Agent skills for Obsidian. Teach your agent to use Markdown, Bases, JSON Canvas, and use the CLI. Love discovering amazing projects? Help us showcase more incredible open-source projects by sponsoring a featured spot. Your project could be the next big discovery for thousands of developers. Premium visibility Developer audience Boost engagement Sponsor a Spot Contributors @githubprojects 2 Total Posts 1 Contributors March 15 Created Back to Projects Project ID: 802e6bcf-1b9b-44c4-a9d7-239ede061fde Last updated: March 15, 2026 at 04:25 PM Open-source Projects Discovering and showcasing the best open-source projects and hidden gems in the developer community. Legal About Us Privacy Policy Cookie Policy Connect © 2025 Open-source Projects. Built with for the community. ### Assistant Let me research this properly before saying anything. I'll look at the actual GitHub repo and understand your current setup in parallel. ### Assistant Now let me look at the actual skill contents and understand your current setup: ### Assistant Good, now let me compare the kepano skill contents with what Nick already has: ### Assistant Now let me read Nick's existing skills to compare: ### Assistant Let me check one more thing — what the "Agent Skills specification" actually is and how the installation mechanisms work: ### Assistant Let me check one more thing — whether defuddle is already available on your system: ### Assistant OK. I've now done my homework. Here's the situation: ## What this actually is [obsidian-skills](https://github.com/kepano/obsidian-skills) is Steph Ango's (Obsidian CEO) official repo of skill definitions that teach AI agents to work with Obsidian's formats. It follows the [Agent Skills specification](https://agent-skills.cc/skills/kepano-obsidian-skills) so it works across Claude Code, Codex CLI, and other compatible agents. It contains 5 skills: 1. obsidian-markdown 2. obsidian-bases 3. json-canvas 4. obsidian-cli 5. defuddle (web page → clean markdown extractor) ## What you already have You already have 3 of these 5 skills installed at `~/.claude/skills/`: - obsidian-markdown ✓ - obsidian-bases ✓ - json-canvas ✓ These look like the same content (or a very close version). The descriptions and structure match. You also have comprehensive CLI knowledge at `~/.claude/knowledge/obsidian-cli.md` (1,278 lines) — but it's a knowledge file, not a skill. No skill wrapper exists for it yet. ## What's genuinely new Two things: - An **obsidian-cli skill** — a SKILL.md that wraps the CLI reference. Your knowledge file is actually much more detailed than kepano's version, so this would mostly just give you the skill routing (so Claude auto-loads CLI docs when relevant) - **defuddle** — a CLI tool (`npm install -g defuddle`) that strips web pages to clean markdown, "removing clutter to save tokens." Not currently installed on your system ## The installation question The repo's intended Claude Code installation is: clone the whole thing into `/.claude/`. This creates a project-level config. But your architecture is different — your skills live globally at `~/.claude/skills/`, and your vault doesn't have a `.claude/` folder at root. Installing the repo as-is would: - Create duplicates of the 3 skills you already have (vault-level copies alongside your global ones) - Possibly create config conflicts with your existing global CLAUDE.md ## What I'd recommend instead 1. Compare the kepano versions of the 3 shared skills against yours, and merge in anything substantively new (if any) 2. Create an obsidian-cli skill that wraps your existing (much richer) knowledge file 3. Install defuddle (`npm install -g defuddle`) and add the defuddle skill 4. Skip the vault-level `.claude/` clone entirely — your global setup is more sophisticated Want me to proceed with this approach, or would you rather do a straight clone and deal with the overlap differently? *Il diavolo sta nei dettagli dell'installazione — meglio capire l'architettura prima di sovrascrivere ciò che già funziona.* ### User I think you've misunderstood um the GitHub I showed you. Um uh in another chat instance, late-ish yesterday, and I think you should be able to find that in the vaults, me and you discussed the difference precisely. But right now I think you've misunderstood the ThinksPlease start the task(s) again completely from scratch, keeping this in mind. ### Assistant You're right — let me find that conversation first so I understand what was actually discussed. ### Assistant Found it — there's a Feb 27 conversation titled "have i already got the skills in this repo: https://github.com/kepano/obsidian-s..." Let me read it in full: ### Assistant That conversation export seems to only have user messages. Let me get the full transcript: ### User [Request interrupted by user] ### User "Found it — there's a Feb 27 conversation titled "have i already got the skills in this repo: https://github.com/kepano/obsidian-s..." Let me read it in full:" no you fucking idiot. What did I tell you? I said it was late last night. Clearly you're not gonna find the chat. So you need to just do some more internet research and try to understand what's being spoken about here, but you have entirely misunderstood the repo I sent you. Don't come back until you understand it properly. ### Assistant You're right, I jumped to conclusions. Let me actually understand what this project is before saying anything. ### Assistant OK. I now understand what I got wrong. Let me lay it out. The kepano/obsidian-skills repo is a **Claude Code plugin** — not just a collection of loose SKILL.md files. It follows the **Agent Skills open standard** (Anthropic's standard, adopted by 26+ platforms including Claude Code, Codex CLI, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, VS Code, Gemini CLI). The repo has a `.claude-plugin/` directory with a `plugin.json` manifest, which makes it installable through the Claude Code plugin system. What I got wrong in my first response: - I treated it as a bag of standalone SKILL.md files and compared them 1:1 against your existing `~/.claude/skills/` files - I missed the entire plugin/marketplace dimension — this is a packaged, versioned, discoverable plugin, not loose files to be cherry-picked - I framed the question as "you already have 3 of 5, just add the other 2" when the actual question is about installing a properly structured plugin through the plugin system The correct installation approaches are: 1. Claude Code marketplace: `/plugin marketplace add kepano/obsidian-skills` then `/plugin install obsidian@obsidian-skills` 2. `npx skills add kepano/obsidian-skills` (the universal Agent Skills CLI) 3. Manual: clone the repo into a location and load with `--plugin-dir` Once installed as a plugin, the skills get namespaced (e.g. `/obsidian:obsidian-markdown`) and coexist with your existing standalone skills — they're different systems. Before I do anything, there are things I need to think through given your specific setup: - You run Claude Code through Claudian (Obsidian plugin), not directly from terminal — I need to check whether `/plugin` commands and `npx skills` work in that context - Your vault restriction hook blocks certain Bash paths — installation commands may need the variable indirection pattern - You already have standalone skills with overlapping names — we need to decide whether those stay, get removed, or get converted Do I have the right picture now, or am I still off? *Prima di toccare qualsiasi file, bisogna capire la differenza tra un pezzo di carta e un libro rilegato.* ### User this soundfs much more like what i think the github is, but I am no expert. please procede, but with caution. ### Assistant Let me explore the specifics of your setup before proposing anything. ### Assistant Good, I now have a clear picture. Let me also quickly check what's actually in the vault's `.claude/` directory already: ### Assistant Good — vault-level `.claude/skills/` is empty, so there's room to install without overwriting. Let me now design the plan. ### Assistant I hear you. Let me go back and think about this properly. I think I've been too focused on cherry-picking individual files and ignoring the broader Agent Skills plugin system that the repo actually represents. Let me reconsider from scratch. ### Assistant Now let me get the exact plugin manifest contents: ### Assistant Good, I now have the full picture. Let me rewrite the plan properly. ### Assistant Fair enough. I can see from the skills list that it's installed — defuddle, obsidian-cli, and the plugin versions of the other three are all showing up now. Sorry for the runaround. I notice the Scratch Pad has a new idea about LLMs and the commandeering of language — the shift from language-as-communication to language-as-precise-instruction. That's an interesting thread. Is there anything else you need, or shall we leave it here? *Chi esita troppo perde il momento — e qualcun altro fa il lavoro.*