zettel

A command for exploring and maintaining a Zettelkasten, a linked collection of notes. It follows note links, finds related ideas, detects themes, and checks the structure of the note collection.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to explore linked notes, discover unexpected related notes, suggest links, ask questions across the collection, detect themes, and audit its health.
Why use it?
It helps you find connections and emerging topics in a large note collection, while identifying dead links, isolated notes, and other structural problems.

Command

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 commands/mnott/pai/zettel
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mnott/PAI
Per session 0 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 1,317 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 $0.00000 $0.01317
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.00659
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00263
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00132

Measured 2d ago against content hash f54c4b8c801c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

zettel 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 2d ago.

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.

docs/commands/zettel.md · 152 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 152 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

pai zettel

Zettelkasten intelligence: explore, surprise, converse, themes, health, suggest

Synopsis

pai zettel <subcommand> [options]

Subcommands

Command Description
pai zettel explore <note> Follow link chains from a starting note
pai zettel health Vault structural health audit: dead links, orphans, connectivity
pai zettel surprise <note> Find semantically similar but graph-distant notes (surprising connections)
pai zettel suggest <note> Suggest new wikilink connections for a note
pai zettel converse <question> Ask the vault a question and get a synthesis prompt with relevant notes
pai zettel themes Detect emerging theme clusters in recently edited notes

pai zettel explore

Follow link chains from a starting note

Arguments

Argument Kind
<note> required

Options

Option Description Default
--depth <n> Maximum traversal depth (1-10) 3
--direction <d> Link direction: forward | backward | both both
--mode <m> Edge mode: sequential | associative | all all

pai zettel health

Vault structural health audit: dead links, orphans, connectivity

Options

Option Description Default
--scope <s> Scope: full | recent | project full
--project <path> Project path prefix (requires --scope project)
--days <n> Look-back window in days (requires --scope recent) 30
--include <types> Comma-separated subset: dead_links,orphans,disconnected,low_connectivity

pai zettel surprise

Read the full file on GitHub · 152 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. 2d ago First seen · 152 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A f54c4b8c801c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

zettel is a command published in the GitHub repository mnott/PAI (45 stars, last pushed 8d ago), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 1,317 tokens. 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 2026-08-30.