DeveloPassion's Newsletter #218 - Married, and Obsidian Starter Kit v5 Is Out
Edition 218 of my newsletter, discussing Knowledge Work, AI, Knowledge 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 ❤️
Last time, I promised the next edition would come from a married man. Promise kept 💍
On Saturday, September 19th, my wife and I said yes. Twice, actually: once at the town hall, once at the church. Then 150 guests and a brass band joined us to celebrate. Even the sun that nobody expected decided to show up. The day was perfect from start to finish. I'm still smiling when I think about it.
Nobody warned me about the days after, though. You spend months preparing a single day, it goes by in a flash, and then... it's Monday. If you've been through it, you probably know what I mean 😅
Getting back to work helped. And I had a ton of work waiting for me. In particular, one big release waiting. The Obsidian Starter Kit v5 is out. As promised, I waited until after the wedding, so that I could be fully there for you when it landed.
Alright, let's gooooo 🚀
Highlights
- 📦 Obsidian Starter Kit v5 is out. The AI-ready vault I run my whole business from. Last release at the current price
- 💬 A new plugin: Knowii Community for Obsidian. Read, post, reply and get notified about what's happening within the community without leaving your vault.
- 🔌 Agentic Resource Discovery Server is now in the Obsidian plugin directory. My Claude Code sessions are now lighter than ever.
- 🎥 Knowii Video AI now has scenes, a scene editor, cut by transcript and YouTube-ready exports.
- 🧠 My take on three AI launches: Claude Opus 5.5, Claude Code Projects, and Jev (a model that decides instead of writing)
Before You Go Any Further
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📦 Obsidian Starter Kit v5 Is Out
Version 5 of the Obsidian Starter Kit shipped on September 25th. If you're subscribed to my blog, you already received the launch article by email. I won't repeat it all here; I'd rather tell you what it means to me.
This kit is the vault I actually work in. My newsletter, my articles, my videos, my Obsidian plugins, my product launches, my CRM, my goals, projects, tasks, activities, etc: all of it lives there. And v5 brings the kit back in line with the vault I use every day. Everything that proved itself over the past months is in the box.
In short:
- Your AI knows your whole context. Goals, projects, tasks, activities, ideas, people, notes, and even how you write, structured so that AI Agents can find it all. You stop re-explaining yourself every session
- Your AI does the work. A library of AI skills and a team of agents that write, plan, research, review and file notes with/for you. And they remember what they did from one session to the next
- It does the boring work even without AI. Finished work files itself, your daily routines are one click away (Quick Actions), every commitment gets a home (Activities and Ideas), and you plan the week you want before it starts (the Ideal Week)
- It works on day one. Note types, templates, plugins, skills and MCP servers come wired together
There's a LOT more in the release notes. I spent a ton of time preparing this release.
I also recorded a short promo video (made with Remotion, which I'm enjoying more and more):
If you already own the kit, the update is free, as always. Download v5.0.x from your Gumroad library or from the Knowii Obsidian Starter Kit space (https://learn.knowii.net explains both), back up your vault, then follow the migration guide.
Already on 5.0.0? Get 5.0.1. Some of you told me that daily notes sometimes came out empty. You were right. Since Templater 2.25, the "Trigger Templater on new file creation" setting is stored per device and OFF by default, so the value shipped in the kit was simply ignored. My own vault worked fine because the setting was already on for my machine, so my testing didn't catch it. Manual fix: Settings → Community plugins → Templater → turn on "Trigger Templater on new file creation". Do it on EACH device.
If you don't own it yet, now's the time. v5 is the last release at the current price: €199.99 for Essentials, or €249.99 for Premium (which adds the Obsidian Starter Course). Every future update stays included at no extra cost, and there's a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Sebastien Dubois
Release notes and migration guide:
Questions? Ask me in the Knowii announcement thread: https://www.knowii.net/c/announcements/obsidian-starter-kit-v5-0-0-is-here
💬 Knowii, Inside Obsidian
I spend most of my day in Obsidian. Yet taking part in a discussion in the Knowii Community meant switching to the browser. And coming back to Obsidian ten minutes later.
So I built the Knowii Community plugin for Obsidian.
What it does:
- The whole community in a pane, in the main area or in the sidebar. You sign in once
- Notifications inside Obsidian (and system notifications if you want them): direct messages, replies, mentions, new posts, events. Unread counts show up in the status bar and on the ribbon icon. You can even reply to a direct message straight from the notice
- A "What's new" inbox, think Gmail for the community. Searchable, and marking items as read or archiving them syncs back to Knowii
- Save as note: any post (with its comments) or chat thread becomes a note in one click
- Ask the community from a text selection or from a whole note
- Upcoming events, with a reminder 15 minutes before they start
The "save as note" part is the one I'm most excited about. When you find something useful in the community, it belongs in your knowledge base. Copy-pasting from a browser tab doesn't count.
The plugin ships with the Obsidian Starter Kit v5 (enabled by default).
🔌 Stop Preloading Your AI Skills
My vault contains hundreds of AI skills and dozens of agents. That's great... until you look how much context it uses.
Claude Code loads the name and description of every skill when a session starts. With a library that size, it cost me tens of thousands of tokens per session, before I even typed a word. And every new skill made it worse. The more useful my library became, the more expensive each session got (not exactly the incentive I was looking for).
I created the Agentic Resource Discovery Server plugin for Obsidian to fix that. It turns your vault into a local catalog of your skills and agents, served over HTTP and MCP (the standard way for AI assistants to talk to external tools). Instead of loading everything up front, AI Agents can use it to search the catalog when it needs something, and fetches only that.
It's now listed in the official Obsidian plugin directory, and it's set up by default in the Obsidian Starter Kit v5.
GitHub Radar
I maintain a LOT of open source and private repositories, spread across my own accounts and multiple organizations. Obsidian plugins, the Obsidian Starter Kit, Knowii tools and various websites. Keeping track of every open issue and pull request was a mess. I tried GitHub Projects, but couldn't get what I needed easily.
So I built GitHub Radar: a single page app listing every open issue and pull request across the users, organizations and repositories you care about.
Don't worry about logging in. There's no server behind. Your GitHub token (PAT) is only ever sent to GitHub itself.
It's free and open source, and it's generic: point it at your own sources and it works for you too.
Software for One
A couple of years ago, building apps for yourself was quite hard to justify. The time investment required to build certain apps did not make much economic sense. One would just do it out of sheer passion, as a way to acquire/hone skills, as a leisure activity or as a starting point for building a product/business. And the number of things you could afford to build (however talented you were) was quite limited.
Today, with AI Agents, the equation has changed. It's now a perfectly reasonable call to build your own things, even if they're just for you. Adam Waxman wrote a great essay about this, which sparked a lively discussion on Hacker News. He calls it software for one.
The thing is, once you CAN build almost anything, the real skill becomes deciding what deserves to be built. My rule of thumb: build only where the friction blocks a goal that matters to you, and where nothing out there fits the way you work. Everything else can wait, be bought, or be tolerated.
Of course, it still does make sense to build things just for fun, for learning or as a starting point for building a product or business. That's not my point. The point here is that the bar was lowered, and the ceiling has moved up. Many more people can now build what they need, without necessarily spending months or years learning how to write code. And makers can now build a whole lot more than they could before.
Just don't forget that every tool you build is also something you'll have to maintain (with or without AI). And maintenance requires time no matter what.
I've written a full article on this topic. It's coming soon.
🎥 Latest Videos
Journaling Is the Most Underrated Knowledge Management Habit. When you hear "journaling", you might think about feelings and self-reflection. That's part of it of course. But my daily note is also where I focus, where I track my life, and where every piece of knowledge enters my system. It's the engine of my productivity. It's my guiding light. It's my guardrail.
To help you get started, one of the lessons of my Knowledge Management for Beginners course is now free on YouTube:
Design Your Ideal Week in Obsidian. Two features I added to the Kanban Action Planner plugin for Obsidian: triage mode, to decide what matters on a crowded board one card at a time, and ideal week mode, to plan how you actually want to spend your time. I introduced the Ideal Week in the last edition; this video shows it in action.
The Lab 🧪
🎥 Knowii Video AI Learned to Edit
In the last edition, I told you about my video editor app project. Since then, it grew up quite a bit:
- Scenes: choose a composition per take (camera only, screen with my face in a corner, face above the screen with captions in between...). And a scene editor to create your own, on a live preview
- Cut by transcript: select words in the transcript to cut them, or tighten a pause. With undo and redo
- Preview before export: watch the video exactly as it will be exported, cuts and all
- YouTube-ready exports: several formats and qualities in one go (4K and 1080p, mp4 and webm), with support for generating SRT files or integrating captions directly in the videos
- Voice leveling: exports can even out my voice
- Transcript fixes: correct a misheard word once, and the fix goes everywhere (app, captions, transcript file).
- Knowii Voice AI integration: Knowii Video AI can now detect a Knowii Voice AI installation, and use it for transcription.
Every feature works on three surfaces: the window, the command line, and AI agents through the MCP server 🔥
🎙️ Knowii Voice AI
The next Knowii Voice AI release is getting big: on top of the batch I described last time, there's now an Obsidian integration (in beta); also with specific support for the Obsidian Starter Kit. The next release is coming soon.
🧩 Kanban Action Planner
The Kanban Action Planner plugin for Obsidian has continued to evolve. The highlights:
- The targets table: a second way to look at your Ideal Week. Weekly targets per activity, planned time and the gap, grouped by area of your life
- A visual Pomodoro timer, with a full-screen variant, plus better time tracking (pause, idle detection, chained phases)
- An Archive button on done columns, to archive the whole column at once (if you don't want to wait for the automated archiving)
- Card titles without the note type's prefix or suffix, status colors for every note type, and more (also integrated with OSK)
🔌 Other Project Updates
- Claude Epic Status Line 2.1.0: the cost of each turn in your context, a pace projection on the rate limits, and a hint telling you when to
/compactor/clear - AI Editor 0.11.0: a right-click menu on the review findings, and you can now act on findings in note properties right from the panel
- A heads-up if you use Dataview Serializer: version 3.1.3 renamed the "insert query block" command. If you had a hotkey or a mobile toolbar button for it, check it after the update
- Security/maintenance updates for most of my (20+) plugins
🔗 Cool Finds
Three AI launches caught my attention recently. I wrote a short take on each:
- Claude Opus 5.5: Claude Fable 5.1-level work on most tasks, for about 40% less than Opus 5. And it finally writes clearly. Watch out for the breaking API changes and the safeguard routing (some requests get answered by an older model): https://www.dsebastien.net/claude-opus-5-5-fable-level-work-for-less-than-half-the-price/
- Claude Sonnet 5.5: didn't have time to write about this freshly released model, but it looks really powerful/affordable!
- Claude Code Projects: one conversation that splits the work into parallel threads automatically. You stop orchestrating sessions and talk to ONE agent that manages the others: https://www.dsebastien.net/claude-code-projects-stop-managing-sessions-talk-to-one-agent/
- Jev and Decision Models (DMs): a new kind of model focused on making decisions with calibrated probabilities, at a fraction of the cost of an LLM. And it's crazy fast too: https://www.dsebastien.net/jev-and-system-one-models-a-semantic-if-statement-for-your-code/
🧠 Tip of the Week
Keep your daily note open all day.
Most people open their journal once in a while, if at all. Try the opposite. Open today's note in the morning, and leave it open.
Use it for three things:
- Focus: the two or three things that matter today, at the top
- Track: what you did, what went wrong, what you're grateful for
- Capture: every idea, link or half-baked thought goes there first. Sort it out later
It sounds trivial. It's not. It can actually be life-changing. It gives you an anchor for everything: what you want to do, what you've achieved, the problems you're facing, the ideas you have in mind, your discoveries, etc. Use it throughout the day, and tell me if ADHD is still a big issue once you've built that habit! Point AI at it, and you'll see how much leverage that alone can create!
🧠 Quote of the Week
Those who don't build have to burn - Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Don't listen to naysayers. If they have time to criticize or complain, it's probably because they're not busy creating themselves. Focus on what you want to achieve, and don't waste time with people who'll just never get it! ;-)
Until Next Time
Thanks for reading. Reply to this email if something resonated, something annoyed you, or you just want to say hi. I read everything.
That's it for today! ✨
Want more?
- 🚀 Get the Obsidian Starter Kit v5 at the current price: https://www.store.dsebastien.net/product/obsidian-starter-kit/
- 🎁 Grab the free Complete Guide to Obsidian Automation: https://www.dsebastien.net/free-complete-guide-to-obsidian-automation/
- 🧠 Join Knowii: https://www.store.dsebastien.net/product/knowii-community/
- 🎙️ Try Knowii Voice AI: https://voice-ai.knowii.net
- 📺 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dSebastien
- 🔌 All my free tools: https://tools.dsebastien.net
- 📰 More content at https://dsebastien.net
Talk to you again soon ❤️
— Sébastien
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