What is vault-memory CLAUDE.md?

Instructions for using vault-memory, a local service that gives AI assistants searchable access to Obsidian notes. It supports note search, links between notes, metadata queries, and controlled writes.

Use it to search and navigate Obsidian knowledge, query note metadata, create agent-authored documents with provenance, and work with task contracts.

It helps an assistant use a personal knowledge vault with source tracking and safeguards, instead of silently changing notes or losing context between tasks.

How owrede/vault-memory configures Claude Code

Reuse

Borrowing it

Nothing to install: this file belongs to owrede/vault-memory. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.

Copy the file

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/owrede/vault-memory/main/CLAUDE.md

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/owrede/vault-memory

Made for: Claude Code.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/owrede/vault-memory/claude-md/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/instructions/owrede/vault-memory/claude-md)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/owrede/vault-memory/claude-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/owrede/vault-memory/claude-md/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/owrede/vault-memory/claude-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/owrede/vault-memory/claude-md.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 5,897 This file is loaded in full into every session.

When invoked 5,897 The same file — it is already loaded in full.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.

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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.05897	$0.05897
Opus 5.5	$0.02359	$0.02359
Sonnet 5.5	$0.01179	$0.01179
Haiku 4.5	$0.00590	$0.00590

Measured 2mo ago against content hash cd298585a3d1, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

vault-memory CLAUDE.md 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 2mo 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.

CLAUDE.md · 327 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 327 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Project

vault-memory — Agentic Knowledge Layer (v2)

vault-memory is an MIT-licensed, local-first MCP server that exposes Obsidian vaults to MCP-aware agents (Claude Code, Claude desktop, ChatGPT Custom Connectors, generic MCP clients) as a set of tools for search, graph navigation, frontmatter queries, and atomic writes. Today (v1.0.0) it is a strong retrieval substrate — hybrid search (semantic + BM25 + RRF, optional cross-encoder rerank), 23 MCP tools, live indexing, multi-vault, hash-protected writes. The v2 project evolves it from "Layer 0 retrieval" into a full agentic knowledge layer: memory namespace with provenance, document-tree retrieval, authority/staleness signals, graph-as-retrieval, a compiled-brief layer that beats the "agents rediscover 85% of context every run" failure mode, and user-defined task contracts that any MCP-aware agent can discover and instantiate.

Core Value: Local-first, source-agnostic-ready, agentic knowledge layer over your Obsidian notes — with the memory namespace as a non-negotiable safety invariant. Agents never write silently into user notes; every agent-authored document carries provenance properties and lives in a labeled MemorySink.

Using vault-memory as an agent (task contracts)

This block guides an agent that operates vault-memory as an MCP server for a user — not an agent editing this codebase. It is the discoverability bridge for the contract tools, mirrored by the use-contracts skill (skills/use-contracts/).

When a user asks for an outcome that a task contract already produces — a meeting-prep brief, a project status, a code-review brief, or any "compile / pull together / summarize X from my notes" request — prefer running the matching contract over assembling the answer ad hoc. Contracts are the user's saved, repeatable recipes; they gather the right notes and compile a brief into the memory sink with provenance.

The flow (the use-contracts skill spells it out step by step):

Read the full file on GitHub · 327 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.

2mo ago First seen · 327 lines · 5,897 tokens per session scan A cd298585a3d1

Subscribe to this mod's changes

vault-memory CLAUDE.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository owrede/vault-memory (1 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 5,897 tokens to every session, about $0.0236 per session on Opus 5.5. 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.

Memory and context

vault-memory CLAUDE.md next to 6 instructions from other repositories
Mod	Type	Stars	Last push	Licence	Scan	Tokens	Works with
vault-memory CLAUDE.mdowrede/vault-memory	Instructions file	1	1mo ago	MIT	A	5,897	Claude Code
vscode buildNext.instructions.mdmicrosoft/vscode	Instructions file	195k	yesterday	MIT	A	9,719	GitHub Copilot
next.js AGENTS.mdvercel/next.js	Instructions file	143k	yesterday	MIT	A	7,461	Codex, OpenCode
langchain AGENTS.mdlangchain-ai/langchain	Instructions file	149k	yesterday	MIT	A	4,680	Codex, OpenCode
vscode oss-third-party-notices.instructions.mdmicrosoft/vscode	Instructions file	195k	yesterday	MIT	A	5,516	GitHub Copilot
vscode copilot-instructions.mdmicrosoft/vscode	Instructions file	195k	yesterday	MIT	A	3,093	GitHub Copilot
deepseek-harness AGENTS.mddeepseek-ai/deepseek-harness	Instructions file	274k	2d ago	MIT	A	4,313	Codex, OpenCode

vault-memory: Instructions file for Claude Code