Newsletter Archive

DeveloPassion's Newsletter #209 - AI Skills

Building reusable AI skills that encode your exact workflows — from handwritten notes to structured Obsidian notes, two new plugins, website upgrades, Claude Epic Status Line, and why the future isn't better prompts but better skills.

Sebastien Dubois

11 Mar 2026 — 18 min read

Edition 209 of my newsletter, discussing Knowledge Work, AI, Knowledge Management, Management, Zen Productivity, Personal Organization, and more!

Hello everyone! I'm Sébastien Dubois, your host. You're receiving this email because you signed up for DeveloPassion's Newsletter, or bought one of my products. Thank you for being here with me ✨

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Welcome

Welcome to all the new readers ❤️

Another week, another newsletter! I hope that you all had a great one 🤩

I started running again and I'm slowly getting back in shape. I managed to run 3x 5K this week 🏃. My legs complain every morning, but it feels great to be moving. On the reading front, I finished Man's Search For Meaning, Deception Point, and Four Past Midnight. Currently reading J'ai commencé par mourir by Gilles Legardinier.

I'll be honest: I'm struggling with consistency on the publishing front. And the biggest challenge isn't organization, motivation, or memory. It's the restart problem.

My week is fragmented. I work my day job on Monday, Thursday, and Friday. The weekend is family time. That leaves me roughly 1.5 days split across Tuesday and Wednesday to work on my projects. And every single time, I hit the same wall: I have to "restart the engine." It usually takes me a few hours before I can even start doing valuable work. It's not about forgetting where I left off. I have great notes for that. It's a mental thing. Stress. Self-doubt. A problematic state of mind that creeps in when multiple days pass between creative sessions. By the time I finally feel warmed up and productive, half my available time is already gone.

I don't have a clean solution for this yet. I'm sharing it because I suspect many of you deal with the same thing, especially if you're building something on the side while holding a full-time job. If you've found ways to reduce that "restart cost," I'd genuinely love to hear about it.

In the meantime, I keep reminding myself: Break the mountain, one grain of sand at a time. Some weeks you ship five things, some weeks you ship one. Both are fine.

Alright, let's gooooo 🚀

This Week's Highlights

🧠 AI Skills — Building reusable AI skills for every part of my workflow
✍️ From pen to vault — New workflow to go from handwritten notes to structured Obsidian notes
🔌 Two new Obsidian plugins — ReMarkable Sync and Transcriber
🎬 Three new YouTube videos — Typefully v3, Books & Obsidian, Time Machine
🌐 Website upgrades — Social sharing, reading progress bar, performance boost
🛠️ Claude Epic Status Line — A new open-source project for Claude Code users
📊 3,300+ concepts on the Concepts website

Before You Go Any Further

I want to reach more people. Got 20 seconds? Then share the link with one friend/colleague who would benefit from joining us! And of course, don't forget to also mention the Knowii Community ❤️

And if you bought some of my products or courses? Then please leave a rating/review. It really helps a lot ❤️

Numbers 📊

A quick snapshot of how things are going across my platforms (last 30 days):

Websites (via Plausible Analytics)

dsebastien.net: 25.7K visitors (+52%), 40.2K pageviews (+34%)
concepts.dsebastien.net: 2.7K visitors (+587% — the programmatic SEO work is paying off!)
notes.dsebastien.net: 4.4K visitors (+21%), 18K pageviews
store.dsebastien.net: 1.4K visitors (+21%)

YouTube

687 subscribers (+54), 7.8K views (3x above typical), 208 watch hours

X (via Typefully)

2,842 followers (+1.5%), 54K impressions, 424 posts

The website growth is encouraging. dsebastien.net up 52% and concepts.dsebastien.net up nearly 6x! My YouTube channel is also growing a bit faster, which tells me the content is resonating. I'm getting closer to the 1,000 subscriber threshold needed to monetize the channel. Still a way to go, but the pace is picking up. If you haven't subscribed yet, now's a great time to help me get there 😉. Social media impressions are down slightly, but follower count keeps climbing.

The Lab 🧪

I've been having a lot of fun building Obsidian plugins lately. Each one solves a specific problem I face in my daily workflow, and together they're gradually turning Obsidian into my complete Knowledge Work OS. Not "just" my single source of truth, but the operational center for everything I do: writing, thinking, managing my business, tracking customers, creating content, and now even bridging analog and digital notes.

From Pen to Vault: Handwritten Notes Meet Obsidian

I've been using a reMarkable 2 tablet for a while now. The writing experience is incredible. But there was always a frustrating gap between what I wrote on paper and what lived in my digital knowledge base. My handwritten notes were trapped on the device, disconnected from everything else.

I've used different approaches, slowly improving my conversion workflow, but still faced too much friction. More details: How to convert notes from analog to digital.

So I built a new solution pipeline to fix that.

First, I set up rmFakeCloud on my NAS; an open-source, self-hosted alternative to the reMarkable cloud. I needed this because I didn't want one more subscription, and found the free tier limits of reMarkable's cloud store to be far too low.

With rmFakeCloud, I now have no limits (apart the disk space on my NAS, but with ~20TB free, that should be fine). In addition, I also have full control over my handwritten data, no dependency on reMarkable's servers. If you care about data ownership (and you should), this is worth exploring.

Then I built the reMarkable Sync plugin for Obsidian. It connects your reMarkable tablet (or rmFakeCloud!) directly to Obsidian, pulling entire notebooks, handwritten notes and converting them into images in your vault.

This plugin supports syncing from the reMarkable cloud or rmFakeCloud, generates images in a configurable target folder, and can import rmdoc files.

Source code: https://github.com/dsebastien/obsidian-remarkable-sync
Documentation: https://developassion.gitbook.io/obsidian-remarkable-sync

And finally, I've created the Transcriber plugin for Obsidian. That one takes things further by processing images and extracting text content, making handwritten notes searchable and usable. That plugin (currently) only supports Ollama. All you have to do is install Ollama, and run ollama serve. Then, you can install/select AI models from the plugin settings.

The full workflow: write on paper → sync to self-hosted cloud → pull notebooks into Obsidian as images → extract text (Markdown) → make it searchable and connected. What used to take me a ton of time/motivation and required manual work now happens in seconds. Every handwritten idea automatically becomes part of my knowledge graph.

Here's what the before/after looks like with the Transcriber plugin:

I published documentation websites for both new plugins and added them to my GitHub profile and projects page.

I'll try to get those plugins approved as official community plugins, but as usual that's going to take some time. By the way, I noticed that the Obsidian team is currently working on improvements around this; hopefully things will get better soon for plugin developers like me!

Typefully Plugin v3 + Improvements

I released v3 of the Typefully plugin for Obsidian, adding more features to manage social media content directly from Obsidian. I also continued improving the plugin further after the v3 release, fixing edge cases and polishing the experience.

Thanks to this, I almost don't need to open Typefully anymore. On one hand I have my OpenClaw AI agent preparing drafts on autopilot, and on the other, I can create/schedule and publish right from the place where I think: Obsidian!

Dataview Serializer Fixes

Fixed several bugs in the Dataview Serializer plugin for Obsidian. This plugin serializes Dataview queries into static Markdown, making your notes portable and readable without Dataview installed (great for AI, but not only). If you're using it, update to the latest version.

Website Performance & UX

I spent some time improving my Website:

Social share links on all blog posts and newsletters; making it easier for readers to share content
Reading progress bar so you always know how far along you are in an article (I wanted to add that for so long!)
Ran a Lighthouse audit and implemented optimizations:
- Performance: 81 → ~90
- Accessibility: 88 → 95+
- Best practices: 58 → ~70
- SEO: 100 (unchanged 🎉)

Small improvements compound over time!

Claude Epic Status Line

Model name (e.g., Opus 4.6)
Context usage with token counts and color-coded thresholds (green → orange → red)
Auto-compact warning — blinking alert when context is getting full
Git status — staged, unstaged, untracked counts, ahead/behind arrows
Worktree detection — shows when you're inside a git worktree
Session cost and duration
Effort level indicator
Rate limit bars — visual progress bars for 5-hour, 7-day, and extra usage with reset times

If you use Claude Code, this is a quality-of-life upgrade you didn't know you needed.

👉 Claude Epic Status Line on GitHub

AI Agent Automations

My AI agent setup keeps getting more capable:

Calculated actual Knowii MRR and set up monthly MRR analysis/reporting
Scheduled a daily brief about Claude Code improvements based on the changelog
Analyzed Ahrefs data to identify SEO opportunities
Fixed broken links across the Concepts and Store websites
Created and scheduled a backup script for automated vault backups
Created the /grill-me skill — a Socratic interview mode that drills into any idea until full clarity is reached (more on skills below 👇)

As a fun experiment, I also connected OpenClaw to my Android TV. I enabled developer mode and remote debugging, then wrote a CLI to control the TV: launch apps, switch channels, play/pause, search for shows and movies, all from the terminal or by voice (thanks to Knowii Voice AI's CLI). AI agents controlling physical devices in my home. The future is now 😄

I've published the source code of the CLI I'm using as an open source project (MIT license): https://github.com/dsebastien/iptv-formuler-cli

Knowledge Worker Kit Progress

As with any mountain, it takes time to climb. But it's all about the journey. More updates coming soon!

👉 Knowledge Worker Kit

Concepts Website: 3,300+

The Concepts website now has over 3,300 concepts! That's 500 more since last edition. I basically capture new concepts whenever I stumble upon or think about one. It's a fun game to play, and I believe it can help others discover valuable ideas.

Go explore: https://concepts.dsebastien.net/explore/

YouTube

The channel is growing nicely: 687 subscribers (+54 in the last 28 days), 7.8K views (3x above my typical range), and 208 watch hours. These are my best numbers yet, and it feels great to see some momentum building.

I published multiple videos recently:

📹 Typefully Plugin for Obsidian v3

📹 Books and Obsidian

📹 Time Machine Plugin for Obsidian

Subscribe if you haven't yet: https://www.youtube.com/@dsebastien

AI Skills: Teaching Your AI How YOU Work

This is something I've been spending more and more time on, and I think it's going to change how we all work with AI. The sooner you realize this for yourself, the better.

I'm building a growing library of reusable AI skills as part of my Obsidian vault. Think of them as specialized instruction sets that teach AI exactly how to perform specific tasks, the way I want them done. Not generic prompts. Not one-off instructions. Reusable, composable skills that encode my workflows, my standards, and my preferences.

Here's the difference between a prompt and a skill. A prompt says "write me a newsletter." A skill knows my exact newsletter structure, my writing style, my banned words, where to find content in my vault, how to generate the promotion tweet, and which products to mention in the CTA. It doesn't guess. It KNOWS.

The power comes from composition. If you've done any software development, you know that the best systems are built from small, self-contained components that you can combine. Skills work the same way. Each skill does one thing well, but skills can load other skills to perform more complex workflows. My newsletter skill doesn't try to know everything. It loads seb-writing (my writing style and banned words), seb-products (my product catalog for CTAs), and obsidian-cli (how to interact with my vault). Each of those skills is independently useful, but together they form a complete newsletter-writing pipeline. This means I can improve any individual skill and every workflow that depends on it automatically gets better too.

I now have over 60 skills covering every part of how I work:

Note management — creating, organizing, and connecting notes following my conventions, graduating ideas from daily notes into proper permanent notes, finding missing links and orphaned content
Thinking — stress-testing ideas, finding contradictions in my beliefs, surfacing hidden connections, tracing how my thinking evolved over time
Business management — analyzing stats, generating reports, tracking revenue, computing customer metrics and lifetime value
Content creation — writing articles, newsletters, social media posts, podcast scripts, YouTube descriptions, all in my voice
Customer & sales — searching customers, aggregating CRM data, tracking product breakdowns and community metrics

To give you a concrete sense, here are five skills I use regularly:

ghostwriter — Writes any content in my voice. It loads my writing style, values, and product catalog before it starts, and always interviews me first to understand what I actually want to say. The output sounds like me, not like AI.
grill-me — A relentless Socratic interviewer that drills into any idea, plan, or decision until all assumptions surface and contradictions resolve. It works through a dependency tree branch by branch, refusing vague answers. I use it to stress-test my own thinking before I commit to anything 🧠.
customer-stats — Aggregates CRM data from my customer notes into a structured report: counts, revenue totals, product breakdowns, lifetime value analysis. What used to take hours of spreadsheet work now takes seconds.
graduate — Scans my daily notes and extracts ideas that deserve to become proper permanent notes. It creates them with the right structure, metadata, and folder placement, while preserving the original daily note content. Ideas no longer get buried in my journal.
connect — Finds non-obvious bridges between unrelated vault domains. It looks for structural parallels and shared mental models across different topics, prioritizing unexpected connections over obvious ones. It's like having a research assistant who reads all 15K of my notes and spots patterns I can't see.

The key idea: each skill encodes a specific process or workflow that I've refined over time. Once it's written, any AI agent can execute it consistently. Skills can also load other skills. My newsletter skill loads seb-writing (my writing style) and seb-products (my product catalog) before it starts. This composability means I can build complex workflows from simple, tested building blocks.

Here's a schematic view of what I'm using now:

Why does this matter for you? Because this is the future of how we'll all work with AI. Not by writing better or "magic" prompts, but by building better skills. Skills that capture institutional knowledge. Skills that encode best practices. Skills that make AI genuinely useful instead of generically helpful. And while some of those skills will become part of the models as they improve, others just never will, because you (or your company) and your processes are unique!

I'll be covering this topic in depth in the coming weeks through dedicated articles and videos. I want to show you exactly how I build these skills, how they integrate with my vault, and how you can create your own.

And many of these skills will be included in the Obsidian Starter Kit and in the BuilderOS I'm working on; the complete creator operating system for people who want to build sustainable businesses through systematic creation. More on that soon 🚀.

Importantly, we're going to dive DEEP into how this all works within the Knowii Community. Come join us!

👉 Join the Knowii Community

If you're already using Claude Code, OpenClaw, or similar AI tools, start thinking about which of your repetitive workflows could become skills. That's step one.

Knowii News

The Knowii Community has reached 400 members! 🎉

That milestone feels great. But I also want to be transparent about some challenges I'm facing.

Many members join and never contribute. Some sign up for a paid tier, grab the bonus resources (the Obsidian Starter Kit, the Obsidian Starter Course, the Knowledge Management for Beginners course and other included products), stay for a month, and leave without ever engaging. I don't blame anyone for this; it's a pattern I see across many online communities. But it creates a real sustainability problem. Every new member takes time and energy to onboard. When they churn after a month, that effort doesn't get reinvested into creating new things for everyone.

I'm seriously considering raising the minimum subscription period to 3 months for paid tiers. This would help ensure that members who join are genuinely interested in being part of the community, not just grabbing bonuses and leaving. I haven't made the decision yet and I'm still thinking about it. If you have thoughts on this, I'd love to hear them.

On a more exciting note: I've resumed office hour sessions 🎉

These are live sessions where all paid members can join, and we dive into whatever questions or challenges they're facing. I share my thoughts, ideas, current solutions, and we explore topics together. It's also a space for me to discuss what I'm currently focused on and get your feedback. Think of it as a group coaching call where nothing is off-limits.

I'll be scheduling these more regularly moving forward. If you've been on the fence about joining the community, this alone is worth it.

Join the Knowii Community: https://www.store.dsebastien.net//product/knowii-community

Weekly Challenge

This week's challenge is about identifying one repetitive workflow you could turn into an AI skill.

Pick something you do regularly: writing meeting notes, processing bookmarks, drafting emails, updating a project tracker. Now ask yourself:

What are the exact steps you follow every time?
What are your quality standards for the output?
What context does the task need (templates, style guides, past examples)?

Write it down. Even if you don't build the skill yet, documenting the process is the first step. You might be surprised how much of your "creative" work is actually a repeatable system waiting to be codified.

Latest Articles

Chaos to Clarity: Unleash Obsidian Daily Notes

A practical guide to using daily notes as the backbone of your knowledge system.

Never Lose a Note Again — Time Machine Plugin for Obsidian

A deep dive into the Time Machine plugin and why version control for your notes matters.

Updated Best Obsidian Plugins Article

I updated my comprehensive Obsidian plugins article. If you're looking for the best plugins for your vault, that's the place to start.

Updated Sync & Backup Article

I updated my sync and backup guide, along with the related notes about Obsidian Sync and the brand new Sync CLI. If you're looking for a solid sync and backup strategy for your vault, check it out:

Notes about the Obsidian CLI

I also updated my note about the Obsidian CLI. The CLI is the foundation for many of my AI integrations, so keeping it solid matters.

Books

Man's Search For Meaning — Viktor Frankl

I finally finished Man's Search For Meaning and I have to say: this is a truly wonderful book. A must-read. No exceptions.

Viktor Frankl's core idea that we can find meaning in any situation, even the most terrible ones, is both humbling and empowering. Meaning isn't something you find. It's something you create through your attitude, your work, and your love for others.

I'll share my detailed notes about this one soon.

If you haven't read it, do yourself a service and pick it up. You won't regret it.

Deception Point — Dan Brown

A solid thriller that keeps you guessing until the very end. It's fast-paced, full of twists, and impossible to put down once you're in.

Four Past Midnight — Stephen King

A collection of four novellas. As usual with Stephen King: ripping, unsettling, and sometimes outright terrifying. Sometimes you just need good fiction to reset your brain 😉.

J'ai commencé par mourir — Gilles Legardinier

Currently reading. A French novel about second chances and starting over. Hope is being able to see the light despite all the darkness.

Quotes of the Week

Each captured idea, assuming it is timely and valuable, is a long-term investment

Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment

Curation is a form of research

Break the mountain, one grain of sand at a time

The world needs more entrepreneurs. It needs more fighters. It needs more magic

New & Interesting Links

PKM / Thinking / Learning

Plain Text Knowledge Management; why plain text wins long-term: thalo.rejot.dev
Tools for Thought as Cultural Practices: numinous.productions

Vibe Coding Is Not the Same as AI Engineering: addyo.substack.com
Context Engineering for Rapid Agent Prototyping: jxnl.co
Anthropic on Context Management: anthropic.com
Parallel Coding Agents by Simon Willison: simonwillison.net
Spec-Driven Development with Markdown and AI: github.blog

Content / SEO

GEO over SEO; how generative engine optimization changes the game: a16z.com
Programmatic SEO in one post; great primer: practicalprogrammatic.com

Obsidian

Obsidian Automations That Save Time: xda-developers.com
I Fed My Entire Obsidian Vault Into NotebookLM: xda-developers.com
Ways I Use Obsidian That Have Nothing to Do With Note-Taking: xda-developers.com
Daily Notes Timeline Plugin: xda-developers.com
Kepano's Bases Backlinks Template: github.com
Notetaking for Historians: publish.obsidian.md

Tools

Timelinize — build a personal timeline from all your digital data: github.com

That's it for today! ✨

Go Further

Why Obsidian is All You Need - From Simple Notes to Complete Productivity

Discover why Obsidian isn't just another note-taking app, but a complete system for managing your knowledge, tasks, projects, and digital life.

Sébastien DuboisSébastien Dubois

Want to go deeper?

About Sébastien

I'm Sébastien Dubois, and I'm on a mission to help knowledge workers escape information overload. After 20+ years in IT and seeing too many brilliant minds drowning in digital chaos, I've decided to help people build systems that actually work. Through the Knowii Community, my courses, products & services and my Website/Newsletter, I share practical and battle-tested systems.

I write about Knowledge Work, Personal Knowledge Management, Note-taking, Lifelong Learning, Personal Organization, Productivity, and more. I also craft lovely digital products and tools.

If you want to follow my work, then become a member and join our community.

Ready to get to the next level?

If you're tired of information overwhelm and ready to build a reliable knowledge system:

📚 KM for Beginners — 10+ hours of structured video lessons
🚀 Obsidian Starter Kit — Ready-made vault with 40+ templates
💼 Knowledge Worker Kit — Complete guides + lifetime community
🦉 1-on-1 Coaching — Personalized guidance
🎯 Join Knowii — Community + ALL courses & tools