Obsidian AI Skills by Steph Ango

Canonical version: Obsidian AI Skills by Steph Ango.

Obsidian AI Skills (the obsidian-skills repository) is an open set of Agent Skills published by Steph Ango (kepano), Obsidian's CEO, that teach AI agents to read and write Obsidian's file formats natively instead of guessing at them. It went up in June 2026 and blew up fast; it was already past 37k GitHub stars when I'm writing this.

Here's why I care. I've been building AI Skills for OSK for a while, and the single biggest failure mode I keep seeing is agents that improvise. They put notes in the wrong place, mangle a Base, or invent frontmatter because nobody ever told them how the format actually works. These skills fix that at the source. They give the agent the rules of the format, so it stops guessing and starts following conventions.

What It Is

• A set of Agent Skills built on the open Agent Skills spec, not tied to one tool
• Vendor-neutral by design: works with Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode
• Focused on file formats, not features. The point is to teach agents the structure of an Obsidian vault so they edit it the way you would

The Five Skills

• obsidian-markdown ; creating and editing Obsidian Flavored Markdown (wikilinks, embeds, callouts, properties)
• obsidian-bases ; working with Obsidian Bases files (views, filters, formulas, summaries)
• json-canvas ; reading and writing the JSON Canvas format (nodes, edges, groups)
• obsidian-cli ; driving a vault from the command line, useful for plugin and theme work
• defuddle ; pulling clean Markdown out of web pages and dropping the clutter to save tokens. Same engine as Defuddle

How To Install

Three paths, pick whichever fits your setup:

• Through the skills marketplace
• Via an npx command
• Manually, by dropping the skills into your agent's .claude folder

Why It Matters

This is a big deal for two reasons.

First, it comes from Obsidian itself. When the person running the app ships the official way for agents to speak its formats, that becomes the reference everyone builds against.

Second, it's another vote for the same idea behind TypedMark: plain-text plus a bit of structure beats both rigid databases and unstructured note soup, especially once AI is in the loop. Teaching the agent the format is what keeps a Markdown system trustworthy as it grows.

If you work with AI inside Obsidian, install them. There's no reason to make your agent reverse-engineer a format that now ships with its own instructions.

References

• Source code: https://github.com/kepano/obsidian-skills

Related

• Steph Ango
• Defuddle
• Obsidian Bases
• JSON Canvas
• Markdown
• TypedMark
• AI Skill Composability
• AI Agent Skills in Chrome
• AI Agent Harness
• Claude Code
• Obsidian Starter Kit plugin for Obsidian

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.

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