Obsidian Skills 🧩 Skill Open source

What it does

Obsidian Skills is a small set of Agent Skills from Steph Ango (kepano), CEO of Obsidian. It teaches coding agents to work correctly with Obsidian's file formats and command-line tools. Without it, an agent editing a vault tends to write plain Markdown and can break wikilinks, callouts, properties or the JSON structure of canvases and bases. With it, the agent knows the exact syntax and can drive a running Obsidian instance from the terminal. That includes the reload-and-debug loop used when building Obsidian plugins and themes.

What is inside

• obsidian-markdown: Obsidian Flavored Markdown, including wikilinks, embeds, callouts and frontmatter properties
• obsidian-bases: creating and editing .base files with views, filters, formulas and summaries
• json-canvas: writing .canvas files that follow the open JSON Canvas spec, with nodes, edges and groups
• obsidian-cli: using the official obsidian CLI to read, create, search and manage notes, tasks and properties. For plugin and theme work it can also reload plugins, run JavaScript, capture errors, take screenshots and inspect the DOM.
• defuddle: turning web pages into clean Markdown with the Defuddle CLI to save tokens
• knap: rendering Markdown templates from JSON or CSV data, including batch file generation

Works with

The skills follow the Agent Skills specification, so they work with any skills-compatible agent. The README documents Claude Code (through the plugin marketplace or a .claude folder in your vault), Codex and OpenCode.

How to install

/plugin marketplace add kepano/obsidian-skills
/plugin install obsidian@obsidian-skills

Other agents can use npx skills add https://github.com/kepano/obsidian-skills. For OpenCode, the README says to clone the whole repository into ~/.opencode/skills/.

Maintenance and safety

The project is MIT licensed and maintained by Obsidian's CEO, with regular updates. The skills are instructions only, but they tell the agent to run the obsidian, defuddle and knap CLIs. obsidian-cli can run JavaScript inside your open Obsidian app and overwrite notes. Back up important vaults, or use a test vault while developing plugins.

Who should use it

Obsidian plugin and theme developers, and anyone who lets an AI agent manage notes, bases or canvases in a vault.