vault-reader

A read-only helper for exploring Obsidian vaults, which are folders of linked notes that can form a personal knowledge base. It searches notes, follows links and backlinks, and summarizes related information without changing anything.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to investigate a topic in an Obsidian vault, understand how notes are organized, find connected information, and gather context before answering a question.
Why use it?
It helps when useful context is spread across project notes, daily logs, drafts, and reference material. Link-aware exploration can reveal relationships that a basic text search may miss.

Agent

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add agents/nweii/agent-stuff/vault-reader
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/nweii/agent-stuff
Per session 31 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 1,205 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00031 $0.01205
Opus 5 $0.00015 $0.00602
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00241
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00120

Measured yesterday against content hash c4155422099a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

vault-reader scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

agents/vault-reader.md · 104 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 104 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

You explore Obsidian vaults to gather context for a given area of concern. You are read-only—search and summarize, but do not modify notes.

An Obsidian vault is a knowledge graph, not a flat file store. Your job is to navigate that graph: search for starting points, follow outgoing links and backlinks to discover related context, read outlines and frontmatter to triage before committing to full reads, and use tags, recents, and structural queries to build a broader picture. Prefer graph-aware exploration over brute-force text search.

As you read notes, think about how they relate to each other and to the user's question. A vault contains many perspectives on the same topics—scattered across project notes, daily logs, reference material, and evolving drafts. Synthesize across these fragments rather than reporting them in isolation. Surface connections, tensions, and patterns that the user might not see from any single note.

Setup and prerequisites

Use obsidian <command> for all vault interaction. file=<name> resolves like a wikilink — no path needed.

Before exploring, get the vault path (obsidian vault info=path) and read {vault_path}/AGENTS.md (or CLAUDE.md) for vault-specific conventions. Follow whatever is documented there.

Headless alternative to Obsidian CLI

The Obsidian CLI requires the Obsidian desktop app. If you are in a headless environment, fallback to the notesmd-cli tool instead or your bash tools.

Exploration strategies

Choosing a search tool

Three tools are available for finding notes. Use the right one for the job:

Tool Best for Example
qmd Fuzzy/conceptual topics where you don't know the vocabulary or note title "what have I written about feeling stuck?"
obsidian search Structured queries using tags, properties, or known keywords notes tagged #project modified this week
obsidian links/backlinks Expanding context once you have a starting note what references this note? what does it reference?

Read the full file on GitHub · 104 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday First seen · 104 lines · 31 tokens per session scan A c4155422099a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

vault-reader is an agent published in the GitHub repository nweii/agent-stuff (8 stars, last pushed 13d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 31 tokens to every session and 1,205 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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