Automate Your Obsidian Vault, From Templates to AI Agents

Get the complete guide to Obsidian automation as a 62-page PDF. Everything from your first template to AI agents running on your vault, in one document you can read offline, annotate, and come back to.

Most articles about Obsidian automation are lists of plugins. Install this, install that. What they never explain is how the pieces fit together, in what order to adopt them, and where it all leads. This guide does.

What's inside

Obsidian automation is three layers stacked on one idea: your notes are plain files, so anything can operate on them. The guide walks through all three.

• Part I: the mental model. Your vault as an operating system for knowledge, the four stages of automation, and the biggest mistake (automating too early).
• Part II: Layer 1, automation inside Obsidian. The seven jobs plugins should do for you: notes that are born correct, capture under three seconds, filing you never think about, formatting, queryable notes, state machines in frontmatter, and buttons and commands.
• Part III: Layer 2, automation around the vault. Git, the command line, REST and MCP, URIs, backup and sync, scheduled jobs, publishing pipelines, ingestion, attachments, OS-level automation, physical buttons, mobile, and batch operations.
• Part IV: Layer 3, AI agents on the vault. Instruction files, skills, hooks, MCP, multi-agent workflows, agents on a schedule, vault maintenance that runs itself, and the risks.
• Part V: my own setup. How I run this on a vault of 20,000+ notes, with an AI assistant that lives inside it.
• Part VI: where this goes. The AI operating system, why it compounds, and the adoption path to start today.

Plus a FAQ and a full list of sources, plugins, and tools mentioned.

Who this is for

Obsidian users who have a working vault and feel the friction: the same manual steps every day, notes that drift out of shape, ideas that never get filed. If you have wondered where AI fits into all this without handing your notes over to a chatbot, this guide is for you.

If you are brand new to Obsidian, start with the free Beginner's Guide to Obsidian first, then come back here.

Get the guide

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Prefer to read online? The living version of the guide is always at dsebastien.net/the-complete-guide-to-obsidian-automation.

About the author

I'm Sébastien Dubois. I have been building knowledge systems for 20+ years, and I run my whole business out of an Obsidian vault. I created the Obsidian Starter Kit, the Knowii community, and I write DeveloPassion's Newsletter about personal knowledge management and AI.