article-to-markdown

article-to-markdown is a skill for Claude Code from Howie126313/obsidian-vault-kit. It costs 86 tokens per session (835 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A workflow for turning an online article, blog post, newsletter, or tweet thread into a structured Markdown note in an Obsidian vault. Obsidian is an app for storing linked notes in plain-text files.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when saving an external URL as an Obsidian note, including articles, newsletters, and tweet threads.
Why use it?
It saves the work of copying, restructuring, tagging, and linking useful online reading by hand.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter. Also seen: names the AskUserQuestion tool.

Part of the obsidian-vault-kit plugin — 6 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it when saving an external URL as an Obsidian note, including articles, newsletters, and tweet threads.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/howie126313/obsidian-vault-kit/article-to-markdown
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.

Any agent
npx skills add Howie126313/obsidian-vault-kit --skill article-to-markdown
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Howie126313/obsidian-vault-kit

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install obsidian-vault-kit, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 6 skills.

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.

agentmods badge for article-to-markdown

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/howie126313/obsidian-vault-kit/article-to-markdown/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/howie126313/obsidian-vault-kit/article-to-markdown)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/howie126313/obsidian-vault-kit/article-to-markdown"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/howie126313/obsidian-vault-kit/article-to-markdown/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.

agentmods 80×15 button for article-to-markdown

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/howie126313/obsidian-vault-kit/article-to-markdown"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/howie126313/obsidian-vault-kit/article-to-markdown.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 86 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 835 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
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.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00086 $0.00835
Opus 5 $0.00043 $0.00417
Sonnet 5 $0.00017 $0.00167
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00084

Measured 9d ago against content hash 34f24b3a2c08, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

article-to-markdown 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 9d 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.

skills/article-to-markdown/SKILL.md · 75 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 75 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Article to Markdown

Convert external article URLs into structured Markdown notes and save them to the Obsidian vault.

Workflow

Step 1: Fetch and Detect Environment

1a. Detect vault root — follow ../../_shared/common-steps.md "Vault Detection" section.

1b. Fetch article content:

Use mcp__firecrawl__firecrawl_scrape to scrape the URL. This covers most pages including JS-rendered content.

If firecrawl fails, ask the user to paste the article content directly. Do not attempt other fallback tools.

Special cases:

  • Tweet threads: use mcp__firecrawl__firecrawl_scrape, reconstruct thread order
  • Paywalled content: ask the user to paste content directly

Step 2: Restructure and Link

2a. Understand and restructure — do NOT simply copy the raw text:

  1. Identify the article's core thesis, key arguments, and supporting details
  2. Determine author, publication date, and source platform
  3. Restructure the content into logical sections with clear headings
  4. Generate 3-8 relevant tags and a 1-3 sentence summary

2b. Search for bidirectional links — follow the Bidirectional Link Search in ../../_shared/common-steps.md.

2c. Format as Obsidian Markdown — follow the template in references/article-template.md exactly:

  • YAML frontmatter with title, date, tags, summary, source
  • Blockquote metadata line with original link, author, date
  • Sections: Background → content → Key Conclusions → Further Thoughts
  • Include [[wikilink]] connections from Step 2b
  • Code blocks with language identifiers

2d. (Optional) Mermaid architecture diagram — if the article has a clear multi-layered architecture or flow worth visualizing, embed a Mermaid diagram after the blockquote metadata and before ## Background. Skip for simple or short articles. Use:

  • graph TD / graph LR for flows
  • subgraph for logical grouping
  • Concise node labels (keywords, not sentences)
  • 3-5 layers, 2-5 nodes per layer

Read the full file on GitHub · 75 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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. 9d ago First seen · 75 lines · 86 tokens per session scan A 34f24b3a2c08

Subscribe to this mod's changes

article-to-markdown is a skill published in the GitHub repository Howie126313/obsidian-vault-kit (3 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 86 tokens to every session and 835 once invoked, about $0.0004 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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