upgrade

A command that imports notes from an existing Obsidian vault into the PAL Second Brain structure, including older obsidian-mind vaults and other vault layouts.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when setting up PAL Second Brain or migrating another Obsidian vault; use dry-run mode to create a migration plan without applying it.
Why use it?
It removes the manual work of sorting and moving an existing collection of Markdown notes into a new organization.

Command for Claude Code

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/superuser-pal/awesome-second-brain/upgrade
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/superuser-pal/awesome-second-brain

Made for: Claude Code.

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 2,612 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 92% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 $0.02612
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.01306
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00522
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00261

Measured yesterday against content hash 9dacf4021dc8, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

upgrade 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.

Origin

This is a copy

92% identical to om-vault-upgrade — 40 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

.claude/commands/core/upgrade.md · 187 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 187 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Vault Upgrade

Import and migrate content from an existing Obsidian vault into this PAL Second Brain vault. Works with older obsidian-mind versions and arbitrary Obsidian vaults.

When to use: After setting up a new PAL Second Brain vault, to pull in your existing vault content. Also works for migrating any Obsidian vault into the PAL Second Brain structure.

Usage

/upgrade <path-to-source-vault>
/upgrade <path-to-source-vault> --dry-run
/upgrade --source <path-to-source-vault>
/upgrade --source <path-to-source-vault> --dry-run

Arguments:

  • <path-to-source-vault> — absolute or relative path to the vault to migrate FROM (positional or via --source)
  • --dry-run — generate the migration plan without executing it (saves to thinking/)

Subagents

  • vault-migrator — classifies files (for arbitrary vaults) and executes the approved migration plan

Workflow

1. Validate & Detect

  1. Parse the source vault path from the user's input. Resolve relative paths.
  2. Verify the source path exists and is different from the current vault.
  3. Verify the source path contains .md files (is it actually a vault?).
  4. Check for vault-manifest.json in the source:
    • Found: read version directly. This is a known obsidian-mind vault.
    • Not found: run version fingerprint detection from the target's vault-manifest.json:
      • Check for claude/MEMORIES.md without brain/ → v1
      • Check for brain/ + bases/ without .claude/agents/ → v2
      • Check for .claude/agents/ → v3.x (refine by checking for specific files)
      • None match → arbitrary vault (not from obsidian-mind)
  5. For arbitrary vaults, also detect the vault's organizational pattern (PARA, Zettelkasten, daily notes, flat, MOC-based, inbox). This shapes how the classifier interprets folder structure. Common patterns:
    • PARA: Projects/ + Areas/ + Resources/ + 04_ARCHIVE/
    • Zettelkasten: Permanent/ + Fleeting/ + Literature/, or many numeric-ID filenames
    • Daily Notes: daily/ or journal/ folder with date-named files
    • Flat: 80%+ of files in vault root
    • MOC-based: files named MOC - *.md or Index - *.md
  6. Report detection result to the user: "Detected obsidian-mind v2" or "This looks like a PARA-organized Obsidian vault — I'll map Projects → work/01_PROJECTS, Resources → reference, etc." or "This is a flat vault with no folder structure — I'll classify each note by its content."

Read the full file on GitHub · 187 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 · 187 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A 9dacf4021dc8

Subscribe to this mod's changes

upgrade is a command published in the GitHub repository superuser-pal/awesome-second-brain (14 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 2,612 tokens. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 92% identical to om-vault-upgrade, differing in 40 lines, and is treated as a copy.