vault

Vault

The vault is a PARA-structured Obsidian brain. Other skills read and write it.

Location

VAULT=./work/vault   # from the harness root

If there is no vault

Don't ask at session start. The first time a task needs the vault:

1. Ask once: "Do you have an Obsidian vault? Where is it?"
2. If they have one elsewhere, link it: ln -s "<their vault>" work/vault.
3. If not, create it:

mkdir -p "work/vault/"{"01 Projects","02 Areas","03 Resources","04 Archive",Clippings}

Then carry on with the original task.

Structure

• 01 Projects/ -- active work with an end
• 02 Areas/ -- ongoing interests
• 03 Resources/ -- reference material
• 04 Archive/ -- inactive items
• 05 journal/ -- yearly journals
• Clippings/ -- saved articles and links inbox (categorize into PARA sections)
• Unsorted/ -- secondary inbox for uncategorized links

Each subfolder has a :feed.md with a dataview query listing its contents by date added. :feed.md is the convention for "show me what's in this section."

Reading the vault

Use read, rg, or find directly against $VAULT. Examples:

# list a section
ls "$VAULT/02 Areas/Music/"

# literal search across the vault
rg -l "cowpunk" "$VAULT"

# show a section's feed
cat "$VAULT/02 Areas/Music/:feed.md"

For semantic search ("what notes feel related to X"), no tool exists yet - fall back to rg with synonyms.

Recent activity

When asked "what's been happening recently in my vault" or "what's new":

# 1. Current journal -- newest entries at the bottom
read "$VAULT/05 journal/Journal.md"
read "$VAULT/05 journal/Journal $(date +%Y).md"

# 2. Most recently modified files across the vault (excludes dot dirs)
find "$VAULT" -name "*.md" \
  -not -path "*/.obsidian/*" -not -path "*/.git/*" \
  -exec stat -f "%m %Sm %N" {} + 2>/dev/null \
  | sort -rn | head -30

# 3. Recently added files per section (by ctime = when file was created)
for section in "01 Projects" "02 Areas" "03 Resources"; do
  find "$VAULT/$section" -name "*.md" -not -name ":feed.md" \
    -exec stat -f "%m %Sm %N" {} + 2>/dev/null \
    | sort -rn | head -10
  echo "---"
done

# 4. Check inboxes
find "$VAULT/Clippings" -name "*.md" -mtime -30 2>/dev/null | sort
find "$VAULT/Unsorted" -name "*.md" -mtime -30 2>/dev/null | sort