vault-explain

A read-only guide to the quality rules used for Obsidian vaults, which are collections of notes and files. It explains metadata, checks, hooks, and workflow settings.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to explain frontmatter, quality gates, vault hooks, Git exclusions, analysis checks, and workflow choices.
Why use it?
It helps answer why a vault rule exists and what a quality check is meant to catch. This avoids having to trace the methodology through several reference files.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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 skills/ondrasek/cc-plugins/vault-explain
Any agent
npx skills add ondrasek/cc-plugins --skill vault-explain
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ondrasek/cc-plugins

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 64 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 812 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 $0.00064 $0.00812
Opus 5 $0.00032 $0.00406
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00162
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00081

Measured 2d ago against content hash 9a0fb8625f57, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

vault-explain 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.

plugins/obsidian-blueprint/skills/vault-explain/SKILL.md · 48 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 48 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Vault Explain

Read-only — does not modify any files.

Context Files

  • skills/shared/references/methodology-framework.md — shared principles, hook architecture, exit codes, 7 quality dimensions
  • skills/vault-setup/references/methodology.md — vault-specific dimensions, rationale, adaptation rules
  • skills/vault-setup/references/analysis-checklist.md — how vaults are analyzed
  • skills/vault-setup/references/workflow-catalog.md — GitHub workflow categories and options

Example Questions

"Why validate frontmatter?" -- Dimension 1 (Frontmatter Integrity). YAML frontmatter is the structured backbone of an Obsidian vault. Broken frontmatter causes Dataview queries to fail silently, search to miss notes, and plugins that depend on metadata to malfunction. Validation catches missing required fields, type mismatches, and unparseable dates before they propagate.

"What's gitignored and why?" -- Dimension 7 (Git Hygiene). Obsidian writes volatile state files (workspace.json, workspace-mobile.json) that change on every session, creating constant merge conflicts in shared vaults. Plugin caches and hotkey configs are machine-specific. The methodology excludes these while preserving community plugin configs, snippets, and templates that should be version-controlled.

"How does the quality gate work?" -- Hook Architecture in methodology-framework.md. The quality gate runs as a Stop hook (exit code 2). It checks enabled dimensions sequentially, failing fast at the first error. Claude reads the structured error output and fixes the issue. The gate re-runs automatically until all checks pass. This prevents "lost in the middle" — long error lists cause Claude to skip or half-fix items.

"What GitHub workflows can I set up?" -- See workflow-catalog.md. Categories include: frontmatter validation on push, link checking on PR, spelling on changed .md files, daily note generation, calendar sync, attachment optimization. The setup skill proposes workflows based on vault characteristics and can research anthropics/claude-code-action for AI-powered review workflows.

Read the full file on GitHub · 48 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 · 48 lines · 64 tokens per session scan A 9a0fb8625f57

Subscribe to this mod's changes

vault-explain is a skill published in the GitHub repository ondrasek/cc-plugins (2 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 64 tokens to every session and 812 once invoked, about $0.0003 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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