Free Resources

All my free guides, downloads, notes, videos, and directories in one place.

Everything I give away for free, in one place. Most of it comes out of twenty years of building knowledge systems, a vault of 20,000+ notes, and the questions people ask me every week. Take what is useful, share it, and if you want to go deeper, the paid work is in the shop.

Guides and downloads

Complete Guide to Obsidian Automation

A 62-page PDF covering the three layers of Obsidian automation: inside the app, around the vault, and AI agents on top. Every plugin and technique that matters, in the order to adopt them, plus my own setup on 20,000+ notes. If your vault feels like more work than it saves, start here.

Beginner's Guide to Obsidian

A 50+ page e-book to get started with Obsidian: the essential features, organization best practices, and the techniques that turn it into more than a note-taking app. The right first step if you are new to Obsidian.

Knowledge System Checklist

A step-by-step checklist, 8 phases and 100+ items, to build a knowledge management system you will actually use, or to audit the one you have. Tool-agnostic.

Tools for Thought Database

A database of ~300 note-taking and personal knowledge management tools, to compare before you commit to one. Includes the questions to ask yourself before choosing.

Free AI skills

Open-source Agent Skills I built for my own workflows and published on GitHub under the MIT license. They work with Claude Code, Cursor, Gemini CLI, and any skills-compatible agent. Install any of them with npx skills add dsebastien/<repo>.

Garmin: connects to Garmin Connect and lets you query your watch data in natural language. I use it to pipe sleep, HRV and workouts into my daily notes.
arXiv: three skills for research papers: search, analyze, and monitor. Standard-library Python only.
Scholar: the companion to the arXiv skills for broader coverage: scholar search, citations, and a two-pass literature-review orchestrator.
Technical documentation: teaches coding agents to write, rewrite, and review technical documentation on top of the Google developer documentation style guide.
Countries, cities and landmark images: two image-generation skills driving Gemini for photorealistic country, city, and landmark imagery with a unified style.

The living list, with what each skill does and how I use it:

My Published AI Skills

The AI Agent Skills I have created and published on GitHub, with what each one does.

DeveloPassion

Learn for free

Free Obsidian workshop

Two and a half hours, from a blank vault to a working system. If you learn better by watching than by reading, start with this one.

Start here

New to my work? This page maps the hundreds of articles on knowledge work, knowledge management, AI, personal organization and Obsidian into a path you can actually follow.

The weekly newsletter on personal knowledge management, Obsidian, AI, and building systems that compound. 215+ editions and counting. Free, and the best way to hear about new resources first.

Public notes

Most of my personal notes, published as they are. 10,000+ notes on knowledge management, tools, concepts, books, and everything I am learning. Search it like a second brain that is not yours yet.

Public notes

10,000+ of my personal notes, published as they are: knowledge management, tools, concepts, books, and what I am learning.