Use Obsidian Agent Skills to Supercharge Your Note-Taking Workflow

If you use Obsidian for notes, the kepano/obsidian-skills collection gives your AI agent native understanding of your vault. Instead of copying content back and forth between Claude and Obsidian, your agent can read, create, and organize notes directly.

This tutorial covers a real workflow: using Claude Code with Obsidian skills to process meeting notes into structured knowledge.

Why This Skill Set Matters

Obsidian uses Markdown, Bases (its database format), and JSON Canvas (its visual whiteboard format). These are all text-based, which makes them perfect for AI manipulation. But your AI agent needs to understand the conventions and structure of each format to produce useful output. That is what this skill provides.

Without the skill, Claude can generate Markdown but it will not know:

• How Obsidian handles wiki-links ([[like this]])
• The frontmatter conventions Obsidian plugins expect
• How to format Bases queries
• How JSON Canvas files are structured

Installation

claude skill add --from-github kepano/obsidian-skills

This installs the full skill set. It includes skills for:

• Creating and formatting Markdown notes
• Working with Obsidian properties (frontmatter)
• Managing JSON Canvas files
• Querying Bases

Real Workflow: Process Meeting Notes into Structured Knowledge

The Problem

You take rough meeting notes during calls. After the meeting, you want to:

1. Clean up the raw notes
2. Extract action items
3. Link to related projects and people
4. File the note in the right folder

Doing this manually takes 10-15 minutes per meeting. With the Obsidian skill, your agent can do it in seconds.

Step 1: Open Your Vault in Claude Code

Navigate to your Obsidian vault directory:

cd ~/my-obsidian-vault
claude

Step 2: Drop Raw Notes

Paste or write your raw meeting notes into a file:

Take these raw meeting notes and create a proper Obsidian note in the Meetings/ folder with:
- YAML frontmatter with date, attendees, and meeting type
- A summary section
- Action items as a checklist with owners
- Wiki-links to any mentioned projects or people that have existing notes

The skill ensures the output follows Obsidian conventions: proper frontmatter, wiki-link syntax, and consistent heading structure.

Step 3: Generate Follow-Up Notes

Ask Claude to create linked notes for any new topics:

The meeting mentioned Project Phoenix and Sarah Chen. Create stub notes for both if they don't already exist, with basic structure and a backlink to the meeting note.

The skill creates properly structured notes with bidirectional links. Your graph view in Obsidian will automatically show the connections.

Real Workflow: Build a Knowledge Index

The Setup

You have a folder of 50+ project notes. You want a canvas that maps how they relate to each other.

Read all files in Projects/ and create a JSON Canvas file at Projects/Map.canvas that shows the relationships between projects based on shared tags, people, and technologies.

The skill knows the JSON Canvas format, so the output file opens correctly in Obsidian's canvas view with proper node positions and edge connections.

Tips

• Keep your vault under version control (git). This lets you review AI-generated changes before committing.
• Run Claude Code from your vault root so the skill understands the full directory structure.
• Use git diff to review what the agent changed before accepting it. AI is fast, but your judgment on what belongs in your vault matters.

When Not to Use This

Skip this skill if you do not use Obsidian. The Markdown formatting conventions are specific to Obsidian's ecosystem (wiki-links, properties syntax, canvas format). For generic Markdown workflows, the standard Anthropic skills cover most needs.

Looking for more productivity skills? Check the SkillMap leaderboard for tools that fit your workflow.