| name | obsidian-daily-log |
| description | Append outcomes, TODOs, and notes to today's Obsidian daily log. Use when the user says "update today's log", "log what I did", "add to my daily note", asks "what did I do today?", or when a discrete piece of work lands and is worth recording. Reads the most recent existing daily note as the canonical template, appends rather than overwrites, dedups, and never touches dataview blocks. |
Obsidian Daily Log
A discipline for keeping an Obsidian daily note current without corrupting it. The skill is generic — your vault layout, frontmatter, and section list are learned from your own most recent daily note, which is treated as the canonical template.
Setup
Tell the skill once where your daily notes live by adding a memory or by setting the path in your project CLAUDE.md:
Obsidian daily notes live at: <absolute path to vault folder containing daily notes>
Daily note filename pattern: <e.g. YYYY/MMMM/YYYY-MM-DD.md>
If no path is set, ask the user before doing anything else. Never guess.
The canonical reference
Before any write, read the most recent existing daily note in the vault. That file is the single source of truth for:
- Frontmatter shape (tags, date format, aliases)
- Section order and headings
- Writing voice and density
- Whether dataview / templater / other rendered blocks are present
The skill does not ship with a hardcoded template. Match what the user already does. If two recent notes disagree, prefer the most recent.
Update workflow
Every update follows the same loop. Do not skip steps.
- Resolve today's file path from the configured pattern and today's date.
- Read the file if it exists. If it does not exist, also read the most recent prior daily note so you know the template. Do not create today's file unless the user explicitly asks or there is a discrete outcome to log.
- Locate the target section by heading (e.g.
## Done Today, ## TODO, ## Notes). Append within that section. Preserve everything else byte-for-byte.
- Dedup before adding. If a bullet referencing the same PR / ticket / outcome is already there, update it in place rather than adding a second. If a TODO is already present, do not re-add it.
- Apply PII redaction (see below) before writing.
- Write back with
Edit, not Write. Single-line or single-section edits only. Never overwrite the whole file.
Section voice
The user's existing notes are the final authority. As defaults when no clear convention is visible:
- Done Today — one bullet per outcome, past tense, links to PRs / tickets inline. Record what changed, not the process. Meaty rationale goes in Notes; here just leave a one-line summary.
- TODO — action-shaped, present tense, with enough context for future-you to act without re-reading the session. Include concrete commands / IDs where relevant.
- Notes — heading per topic. Structure as applicable: Symptom / Root cause / Fix / Verification / Trade-off / Decision. Dense. Assume future-you is a competent engineer who has forgotten the session.
- Standup-style sections (Yesterday / Today / Blockers, or similar) — terse bullets, mirror what's already there.
General style: terse, file:line references where useful, no preamble, no emojis unless the user uses them, no "let me…" filler.
Hard rules
- Read first, always. The user may be editing in parallel. Respect what's there.
- Append, never replace a section unless the user explicitly asks.
- Do not move items between sections (e.g. Done → TODO) without asking.
- Do not touch rendered blocks — dataview, templater, query, mermaid, etc. They are rendered by Obsidian plugins. Leave them alone even if they look empty or wrong.
- Do not auto-write at every tool call. Update on session close, on explicit request, or when a discrete outcome lands (PR merged, ticket closed, decision made).
- Do not create planning / analysis docs alongside the daily log. The daily log is the artefact.
- Preserve all required sections even if empty. If the template has
## Created with a dataview block, that block stays.
PII redaction
Daily logs are read by future-you and possibly teammates. Never paste:
- Customer IDs, emails, names
- Order display IDs, account numbers
- API keys, tokens, session IDs
- Internal links that embed any of the above
Replace with [redacted] or a one-line summary that conveys the shape of the problem without the identifier. When in doubt, redact.
Companion behavior
- "What did I do today?" — read today's file and summarise from it. Do not regenerate from session memory; the file is the source of truth.
- "Create yesterday's log" or any past date — only create if the file does not exist and the user is explicit about the date. Never backfill silently.
- End of session — offer once: "Want me to update today's log?" Skip the offer if the user has already declined this session or has already updated.
When something does not fit the template
If the user lands an outcome and no section in the existing template clearly fits, ask before inventing a new heading. Section drift makes future querying (dataview, search) brittle.
