Introducing the Agentic Resource Discovery Server plugin for Obsidian

Canonical version: Introducing the Agentic Resource Discovery Server plugin for Obsidian.

I just released a new plugin: Agentic Resource Discovery Server plugin for Obsidian. It turns your vault into a local registry for your AI skills and agents. Your AI assistant searches that registry when it needs something, and fetches only that.

Since today, it's listed in the official plugin directory of the Obsidian Community: https://community.obsidian.md/plugins/agentic-resource-discovery-server (the automated review is still running).

In this note, I'll explain why I built it, what it does, and what it changed in my own setup.

Why I built it

My vault contains more than five hundred AI skills and dozens of agents. That's great... until you look at the bill.

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 😅).

So I flipped the model: stop preloading. Let the AI search the library and fetch what it needs, when it needs it.

The result, measured in my vault today: a plain claude session now starts at about 54K tokens instead of 77K. There's no wrapper script involved. A setting removes the Skill tool and its list, and a startup hook tells the assistant to search the registry instead. It works in the terminal, in the desktop app and in the IDE extensions. And if Obsidian is closed, the assistant simply falls back to reading the skill files directly.

What it does

The plugin scans your skill folders (.claude/skills) and your agent definitions (.claude/agents), then builds a catalog out of them. It serves that catalog on 127.0.0.1, both over HTTP and as an MCP server (MCP being the standard way for AI assistants to talk to external tools). Everything sits behind a bearer token, and nothing leaves your machine.

Under the hood, it implements the Agentic Resource Discovery specification, so any client that speaks ARD can use it too.

Your assistant gets three MCP tools:

• search: find skills and agents with a natural language query
• get_resource: fetch one skill or agent, with its full text
• execute: a small sandbox to search, filter and combine results in a single call

Search is lexical by default (i.e., it matches words), so there's nothing to download. If you want more, you can turn on hybrid semantic search through a local or hosted embedding server.

Two recent additions made a big difference for me:

• 1.1.0: skills are found by their own quoted trigger phrases. If a skill says it should be used when you ask to "humanize" a text, that's what the search matches on
• 1.2.0: the plugin keeps your vault's .mcp.json in sync with its port and token, so Claude Code connects without you copying anything by hand

This setup ships by default in the Obsidian Starter Kit v5.

Get it

The plugin is desktop-only, since it runs a local server. The current version is 1.2.0.

• Plugin directory: https://community.obsidian.md/plugins/agentic-resource-discovery-server
• Documentation: https://dsebastien.github.io/obsidian-agentic-resource-discovery-server/
• Source code: https://github.com/dsebastien/obsidian-agentic-resource-discovery-server

If your skill library keeps growing, give it a try and tell me how many tokens it saves you.

That's it for today! ✨

References

• Plugin directory: https://community.obsidian.md/plugins/agentic-resource-discovery-server
• Documentation: https://dsebastien.github.io/obsidian-agentic-resource-discovery-server/
• Source code: https://github.com/dsebastien/obsidian-agentic-resource-discovery-server

Related

• Agentic Resource Discovery Server plugin for Obsidian
• Agentic Resource Discovery Specification (ARD)
• Model Context Protocol (MCP)
• Claude Code
• Obsidian Starter Kit

About Sébastien

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