What is people-research?

A research workflow for creating or updating an Obsidian note about one person. Obsidian is a note-taking app that stores linked notes, and the workflow gathers information from LinkedIn, GitHub, web searches, and Red Hat’s employee directory.

It is for preparing for meetings, documenting new contacts, enriching existing People notes, and adding career, technical, and relationship context.

It turns scattered information about a contact into a structured profile, while using a different note format for external contacts and Red Hat employees.

people-research — Skill for Claude Code by jlaska

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 jlaska/obsidian-claude-plugins --skill people-research

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jlaska/obsidian-claude-plugins

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install obsidian-productivity, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 10 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.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jlaska/obsidian-claude-plugins/people-research/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/jlaska/obsidian-claude-plugins/people-research)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jlaska/obsidian-claude-plugins/people-research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jlaska/obsidian-claude-plugins/people-research/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/skills/jlaska/obsidian-claude-plugins/people-research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jlaska/obsidian-claude-plugins/people-research.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 42 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 3,291 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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00042	$0.03291
Opus 5.5	$0.00017	$0.01316
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00008	$0.00658
Haiku 4.5	$0.00004	$0.00329

Measured 2mo ago against content hash 46386c3dc697, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

people-research 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.

skills/people-research/SKILL.md · 368 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 368 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

People Research

Researches a person from LinkedIn, GitHub, the web, and Red Hat LDAP, then creates or updates an Obsidian People note with a structured dossier: career arc, technical focus, connection context, and links.

When to Use

Invoke /people-research [name or context] when:

Preparing for a meeting with someone you don't know well
Creating a People note for a new contact
Enriching an existing sparse People note with research
A calendar attendee doesn't have a People note yet

Works for external contacts (dossier format) and Red Hat employees (vault template format with LDAP enrichment). Complements /people-enrichment, which does batch LDAP updates for Red Hat contacts — this skill does deep single-person research across multiple sources.

Input can be:

A full name: /people-research Spencer Smith
A name + company: /people-research Spencer Smith at SideroLabs
A meeting reference: /people-research the Spencer from my 11am meeting today
A LinkedIn username or email

Workflow

Step 1 — Discover Vault Root

cat ~/Library/Application\ Support/obsidian/obsidian.json

Parse the JSON to find the vault with "open": true. Extract vault_root.

Step 2 — Resolve Person Identity

If the input is a meeting reference (e.g., "Spencer from my 2pm" or "the person on my calendar today"):

Search <vault_root>/MEETINGS/ for the meeting file matching the description
Read the file's attendees frontmatter field to identify the target person

If the input is a name (with or without company hint):

Check if a People file already exists: <vault_root>/PEOPLE/<First Last>.md
If it exists, read frontmatter — extract any known email, LinkedIn username, or company. These seed the research.

Step 3 — Search and Disambiguate

Run searches in parallel:

mcp__linkedin__search_people with the person's name (and company if known)
WebSearch with query: "<Full Name>" <company if known> site:linkedin.com

If one strong match (name + company align, or only one plausible result): State who was found — "Found Spencer Smith, Senior Director at Sidero Labs (Greenville, SC) — proceeding." — and continue without asking. The user can interrupt if wrong.

Read the full file on GitHub · 368 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 Changed · +6 lines 46386c3dc697
2mo ago First seen · 362 lines · 42 tokens per session scan A 5047f236cfdf

Subscribe to this mod's changes

people-research is a skill published in the GitHub repository jlaska/obsidian-claude-plugins (2 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 42 tokens to every session and 3,291 once invoked, about $0.0002 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.

Research

people-research next to 6 skills from other repositories
Mod	Type	Stars	Last push	Licence	Scan	Tokens	Works with
people-researchjlaska/obsidian-claude-plugins	Skill	2	4d ago	MIT	A	42	Claude Code
imagegenopenai/codex	Skill	135k	today	Apache-2.0	A	113	Codex
playwright-climicrosoft/playwright	Skill	100k	yesterday	Apache-2.0	A	19	Claude Code
browser-automationopenclaw/openclaw	Skill	394k	today	MIT	A	36	Claude Code
local-ai-agentsmicrosoft/ai-agents-for-beginners	Skill	80k	7d ago	MIT	A	200	Claude Code, Codex
next-cache-components-adoptionvercel/next.js	Skill	144k	today	MIT	A	95	Claude Code
chat-pet-sprite-creationmicrosoft/vscode	Skill	195k	today	MIT	A	53	Claude Code, Codex