obsidian-mind

Use this skill when the real question is "which obsidian-mind mode does this request need — install, daily session loop, capture, review, maintenance, multi-agent wiring, or semantic search?"

obsidian-mind (breferrari/obsidian-mind) is one specific, ready-made Obsidian vault — not a generic pattern you build from scratch. Cloning or shardmind install-ing it gives a coding agent persistent, session-spanning memory through five lifecycle hooks, /om-* slash commands, subagents that run in isolated context windows, and a career/performance graph (competency notes, brag docs, review briefs). "Procedural code owns the environment; the agent owns content" — hooks classify, validate, and inject context deterministically, while the agent decides what to write and where.

The job is not to dump the whole command/hook/subagent surface every time. The job is to:

1. classify the request into one mode,
2. point at the exact command, hook, folder, or install step the README documents,
3. route out honestly when the request actually belongs to a neighboring skill.

When to use this skill

• Installing or bootstrapping the obsidian-mind vault (ShardMind wizard vs git clone vs GitHub template)
• Running the daily loop: morning /om-standup, in-the-moment capture, end-of-day /om-wrap-up
• Filing a decision, incident, 1:1, or win into the right vault note via the classification hooks or /om-dump, /om-capture-1on1, /om-incident-capture
• Prepping for a review cycle: /om-self-review, /om-review-peer, /om-review-brief, /om-peer-scan, or reading the competency/backlink graph
• Auditing or migrating a vault: /om-vault-audit, /om-tidy, /om-vault-upgrade, shardmind adopt
• Wiring obsidian-mind into Claude Code, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI, or another AGENTS.md-reading agent
• Setting up or explaining the optional QMD semantic-search layer (qmd CLI, .mcp.json, the om MCP server)

When not to use this skill

• The user wants a generic Obsidian vault, plugin work, CLI automation, JSON Canvas, or Bases patterns with no obsidian-mind-specific machinery → route to obsidian-second-brain's note that this repo's obsidian-related skills are template-specific, or handle as a plain Obsidian question outside any skill
• The user wants a self-rewriting vault built on Karpathy's LLM-Wiki pattern (rewrite-not-append pages, contradiction reconciliation, research toolkit, thinking-tools panel) without obsidian-mind's career/performance-graph focus → use obsidian-second-brain (a different upstream project, akillness/obsidian-second-brain) — do not conflate the two vault templates
• The user wants a bare raw/ + wiki/ markdown knowledge base with index.md/log.md, no Obsidian vault template, hooks, or slash commands → use llm-wiki
• The user wants CLI-centric active project/repo memory (decision logs, manifests, handoff notes) scoped to a single codebase, not a personal/career Obsidian vault → use opencontext
• The user is asking about Lapian Notes / shot-by-shot film analysis → that is lapian-notes, an unrelated video-analysis tool, not an agent-memory system

Read references/vault-structure.md if you need the full folder layout before routing.

Instructions

Step 1: Classify the request into one mode

Pick exactly one primary mode before answering:

State the mode explicitly, e.g. "install → ShardMind wizard" or "capture → /om-dump".

Step 2: Install / bootstrap (mode install)

Two supported paths, same resulting vault:

# Recommended: ShardMind wizard
npm install -g shardmind
mkdir my-vault && cd my-vault
shardmind install github:breferrari/obsidian-mind

shardmind install writes into the current directory — always mkdir and cd into a fresh folder first. The wizard collects name, organization, vault purpose, agents to include, and QMD opt-in, then personalizes brain/North Star.md.

# Direct clone (no wizard, no .shardmind/ sidecar)
git clone https://github.com/breferrari/obsidian-mind.git

Either way, finish with the same four steps:

1. Open the installed folder as an Obsidian vault
2. Enable the Obsidian CLI in Settings → General (requires Obsidian 1.12+)
3. Run the agent in the vault directory: claude, codex, or gemini
4. Start talking about work

Requirements (state these exactly when asked): Obsidian 1.12+, an AI coding agent (Claude Code full support; Codex CLI or Gemini CLI), Node 22+ LTS for hook scripts, Git, and optionally QMD.

Full install detail, upgrading (git pull, fork merge, shardmind adopt), and /om-vault-upgrade migration live in references/install-and-agent-wiring.md.

Vault location under the jeo runtime. This repo's install guide (setup-all-skills-prompt.md, Step 3e) does not pin obsidian-mind to one home-directory clone. The vault is project-scoped and resolved at run time as $OBSIDIAN_MIND_VAULT → git rev-parse --show-toplevel of the current directory → ~/vaults/obsidian-mind when you are outside any git repo. So the repo you are working in is the vault, and llm-wiki nests under it at <vault>/llm-wiki/ rather than being dumped next to brain/, org/, and perf/. Set OBSIDIAN_MIND_VAULT to override for a dedicated personal vault.

Step 3: Run the daily session loop (mode daily-session)

Morning:      /om-standup   → North Star, active projects, open tasks, recent changes
Throughout:   talk naturally; UserPromptSubmit hook classifies + routes each message
Big dumps:    /om-dump      → narrate everything at once, agent files it all
End of day:   "wrap up"     → runs /om-wrap-up: verifies notes, updates indexes, spots wins
Weekly:       /om-weekly    → cross-session synthesis + North Star alignment

Five lifecycle hooks make this automatic: SessionStart (context injection), UserPromptSubmit (classification + routing hints), PostToolUse (frontmatter/wikilink validation after .md writes), PreCompact (session-transcript backup), Stop (hygiene checklist). Full hook table and the token-budget tiering live in references/session-lifecycle-and-commands.md, along with the complete /om-* command table.

Step 4: Route a capture (mode capture)

Do not force a manual folder choice — name the command and let the classification hook confirm the destination:

Full subagent table and the performance-graph mechanics live in references/capture-and-review-routes.md.

Step 5: Route a review-cycle request (mode review)

/om-self-review    → self-assessment: projects, competencies, principles
/om-review-peer     → peer review: projects, principles, performance summary
/om-review-brief     → full review brief (manager or peer), evidence pre-linked
/om-peer-scan       → deep-scans a colleague's GitHub PRs into perf/evidence/

These read the performance graph: competency notes in perf/competencies/ are link targets; work notes link to them under ## Related; backlinks accumulate as evidence automatically; review-prep and review-fact-checker subagents aggregate and verify. Detail in references/capture-and-review-routes.md.

Step 6: Route maintenance / migration (mode maintenance)

/om-tidy          → acts on every hygiene flag: archive, group, split — never deletes, never commits
/om-vault-audit    → orphan notes, broken links, stale content
/om-vault-upgrade  → migrate an older/other vault into the current template (supports --dry-run)
shardmind adopt github:breferrari/obsidian-mind   → adopt an existing v5.x clone into managed v6, no re-clone

/om-vault-upgrade works on any Obsidian vault, not just obsidian-mind — it detects version, inventories files, presents a migration plan, and only executes after approval; the source vault is never modified. Full sequence in references/install-and-agent-wiring.md.

Step 7: Wire in the target agent (mode multi-agent)

Only the ~/.claude/ auto-memory loader (MEMORY.md) is Claude Code-specific — it is an index pointing at vault locations, never the storage itself. Hooks, commands, subagent prompts, and brain/ memory are agent-agnostic Markdown/TypeScript/shell with no SDK dependency. Cross-repo access via the om MCP server (search, expand, recall, remember, record_work, reason, health) is covered in references/install-and-agent-wiring.md.

Step 8: Explain optional QMD semantic search (mode qmd)

npm install -g @tobilu/qmd
node --experimental-strip-types .scripts/qmd-bootstrap.ts
qmd --index obsidian-mind query "what did we decide about caching"
qmd --index obsidian-mind update   # after bulk edits
qmd --index obsidian-mind embed    # after many new notes

QMD is optional in the strict sense — without it the vault falls back to grep + the Obsidian CLI — but subagents (context-loader, review-prep, brag-spotter) consult it first for sharper context, and it registers as an MCP server so mcp__qmd__query/get/multi_get appear as native agent tools. It runs three small local models (embeddinggemma-300M, qmd-query-expansion-1.7B, Qwen3-Reranker-0.6B) with no API key and no per-query cost.

Examples

Example 1: First-time install

Input: "Set me up with obsidian-mind so my coding agent remembers our work." Output sketch: Mode install; recommend npm install -g shardmind → fresh mkdir/cd → shardmind install github:breferrari/obsidian-mind; note the wizard personalizes North Star.md; finish with the 4-step open-vault/enable-CLI/run-agent/start-talking sequence; mention git clone as the no-wizard alternative.

Example 2: Daily loop

Input: "What should I run in the morning and at the end of the day?" Output sketch: Mode daily-session; /om-standup in the morning, talk naturally through the day (classification hook routes it), /om-dump for big recaps, say "wrap up" to trigger /om-wrap-up, /om-weekly on a cadence.

Example 3: Review season

Input: "My performance review is next week and I need my self-assessment plus evidence for a peer I'm reviewing." Output sketch: Mode review; /om-self-review for the self-assessment, /om-peer-scan to pull the peer's GitHub PR evidence into perf/evidence/, /om-review-brief (manager or peer variant) to assemble the full brief off competency backlinks.

Example 4: Should NOT trigger — generic self-rewriting wiki

Input: "I want a vault where every new source rewrites the relevant pages and reconciles contradictions automatically — I don't care about career tracking." Output sketch: Recognize this is obsidian-second-brain's rewrite-not-append/LLM-Wiki-evolution model, not obsidian-mind's session-hook + performance-graph model; route there instead of forcing this skill.

Best practices

1. Name one mode (install, daily-session, capture, review, maintenance, multi-agent, qmd) before answering — do not dump the whole command table for every question.
2. Never invent a command, hook, folder, or subagent name that is not in the scraped README or its linked pages — verify against source material, not memory.
3. Treat obsidian-mind as one specific vault template, not a generic "Obsidian + AI memory" pattern; keep it distinct from obsidian-second-brain.
4. Point at the exact folder a note belongs in (work/active/, org/people/, perf/competencies/, brain/) instead of a vague "save it somewhere."
5. Remember QMD is optional — the vault degrades gracefully to grep + Obsidian CLI without it.
6. Route out early and honestly when the request is generic vault work, a Karpathy-style wiki, repo-scoped project memory, or something unrelated like Lapian Notes.

References

• references/install-and-agent-wiring.md — ShardMind vs git clone install, requirements, upgrading/adoption, /om-vault-upgrade, multi-agent wiring, om MCP server
• references/session-lifecycle-and-commands.md — the five lifecycle hooks, full /om-* command table, token-efficiency tiers
• references/capture-and-review-routes.md — subagent table, performance-graph mechanics, Bases
• references/vault-structure.md — full vault folder layout, templates, customization points
• obsidian-mind README (scraped source of truth for this skill)