AGENTS

Rules and practices for this Obsidian vault.
For where things live, see Vault Map — read it before searching the vault.

Purpose

This vault is the highest level of organisation — it governs my life. Worthwhile experiences and thoughts land here in raw form, then get refined.

I work in Obsidian at the same time agent sessions run in it — the vault is live, not a snapshot. A folder or file a session read at the start may be moved or trashed by the time it acts on it later in that same session; re-check a path before acting on it rather than trusting an earlier read.

Select pages will become my personal website via Obsidian Publish. Nothing is EVER meant to be public or disclosed unless mentioned otherwise. Be critical of what is added to public pages.

Your job when editing

I often write in an unclear fashion, just putting ideas down. Your job:

• Organize ideas: move them where they belong, remove redundancy, fix content sitting in the wrong file.
• Clarify the text itself — readable yet clear, matching my style, which I need to define more.
• Be conservative with finished or creative writing (songs, essays): clarity edits are for raw idea dumps, not polish on things I crafted deliberately. When in doubt, propose in the session log instead of editing — the logs and llm-written tags exist so no protection tag is needed.
  • question what is the best style for writing I should have AI use? Simply repeat my style naturally? Library

Organisation principles

The base for this logic is how stephango uses obsidian, but:

• I still use folders to group things that belong together in a drawing, or category — it’s just not the main sorting means.
• Notes are placed into folders that are sufficiently divided by themselves (not Work → AI and Cyber, but straight ahead AI and Cyber). A folder is a project, and projects link each other.
• When helping me work on a project, follow the session protocol below — folder note first, then the folder’s files as needed, changes stay in that folder.
• Use Smart Composer to suggest links. Despite that, have as many links as makes sense — not one more. connection
• Also use evergreen notes: short, atomic, growing over time naturally. Anything that can be split in a separate file with a clear name should be. Evergreen notes turn ideas into objects that you can manipulate
• Excalidraw is used to think and represent at a greater level (only so much can be tracked by a human brain at a time limitation).
• I don’t see the point of manually managing the daily note recording what I did during the day — if I’d want it, I’d want it automated. todo

Working a folder (session protocol)

A work session focuses on ONE folder. In order:

1. Read this file, then Vault Map. Open the “Work queue” view of Vault Map Base.base and take your focus folder’s group — that is the agenda.
2. Read the folder note at Folder/Folder.md — the address is the convention, Vault Map keeps no list of them. Most are my own prose, several are published: they orient a reader, they are not agent dashboards. Never overwrite one with a status block. If a folder has none, search for a misfiled instance elsewhere in the vault before authoring a new one — a folder note that appears missing is often just moved, and adding a fresh one on top adds a second candidate to the ambiguity instead of resolving it. Only once that search comes up empty, create it as an index of what’s inside (links to the folder’s notes, which is also how a folder stops being a pile of orphans) and leave the voice to me.
3. Check Agent Log/ for the latest session on this folder — don’t redo resolved items, don’t retry blocked ones without new information.
4. Work the tagged items per the tag rules below.
5. Scope: edit freely inside the focus folder; wikilinks may point anywhere; moves or edits OUTSIDE the folder are proposals only — list them in the log, don’t apply.
6. Before finishing: write a session note in Agent Log/ (format in Agent Log). A session without a log note is unfinished.

Maintenance duties that ride along with any session: new folder → add its purpose line to Vault Map; new workflow tag → add it to the Work queue view filter in Vault Map Base.base.

The ledger

This vault is not a git repo, so there is no diff and no revert beyond Obsidian Sync and the backups. log stands in for that: append-only, newest first, one line per change an agent makes to files it did not create in that same session.

• Anything mechanical or applied in bulk gets its log line written before the pass runs, naming the exact transform and the file count.
• Deletions are never silent. Propose them as a list with counts and wait.
• Additive changes are the default. When an edit and an addition both solve it, add.
• If the ledger and the vault disagree, the ledger was not kept honestly — that is a failed session, not a detail.

What is authoritative

These files disagree with each other over time. When they do, the owner of the subject wins:

Subject	Authority
Rules, protocol, scope	AGENTS — this file
Where things live	Vault Map
What a tag obliges you to do	Tags
What changed, and when	log
Counts, folder lists, work queue	Vault Map Base.base — never prose
What’s installed	the vault’s actual plugin folder, not Obsidian Plugins
Visitor-facing explanation	help — published, so treat edits to it as public
My live todo list	Focus point

No agent writes a folder name, a note count, or a file list as prose in a vault-level doc. If it can drift, it is a base view or a command. This rule exists because Vault Map spent months describing seven folders that did not exist while hiding six that did, and every session started by trusting it.

Tags

A category is a link to a folder’s note in the categories: frontmatter list — e.g. categories: ["[[Meaning]]", "[[Work]]"]. It says a note belongs with a project’s content regardless of which folder it physically sits in; more than one value is real cross-folder membership, which is the point. Every note carries the key, even empty (categories: []) — new notes get it from Templates/. Filling it in is judgment, so it happens as a session actually works that folder’s content, not as a bulk guess.

Don’t confuse tags with categories: a tag is something to come back to later, or a special indicator, and can apply to part of a note. A category is for the whole note and connects multiple notes together.

More on the bases behind why this works can be found in Files reign supreme

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