AGENTS

Rules and practices for this Obsidian vault.
For where things live, don’t read Vault Map as a fixed index — it’s the published, human-facing page and drifts. Fetch descriptions of the major files directly instead: grep the description: frontmatter field across folder notes and their sub folder notes (see Frontmatter) for a live picture to know what to put where.

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, with AI help.

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.
• Any whole note an agent writes start to finish gets generated-by/generated-at/generated-confidence in frontmatter (see Tags) — not the inline #llm-written tag, that’s only for a partial section inside a note that’s otherwise mine. Add it in the same edit that creates the note, never as a follow-up.
• Bring files together in folders that make sense to make the vault easier to parse, each with their own description.

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
• 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).

Working a folder (session protocol)

A work session focuses on ONE folder. In order:

1. Read this file. Fetch folder descriptions live (grep description: frontmatter across folder notes) rather than relying on Vault Map’s prose.
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.
3. Check Agent Log/ for the latest session on this folder, smartly, not just reading all of it — don’t redo resolved items, don’t retry blocked ones without new information.
4. Work the tagged items per Tags.
5. Scope: edit freely inside the focus folder; wikilinks may point anywhere; moves or edits OUTSIDE the folder are proposals only.
6. Before finishing: write a session note in Agent Log/ (format in Agent Log). A session without a log note is unfinished.

Todo for AI

A root file, private, where I drop work I want an agent to take on. It is the informal half of Conductor: a conductor line runs unattended from a cold start, so it has to name the repo, the file and the constraints on its own, these lines I wrote manually they need to converted, or apply to the vault directly. A line ends with a tag, and that tag is the address — it says where the work lands, not what kind of work it is. website means the site: the loci repo, the Quartz fork that publishes this vault, not a note in here. No tag means the vault itself, or undefined. The tags here are free, not the fixed set in Tags — I coin one whenever a new target appears. The only rule is that it points at exactly one thing.

Plans

Work/Plans/Plans.md is the board to work across the whole vault, and the folder itself contains some projects, or at least should contain a note for each important project.

questing questions is the open-question pattern for a way to present the vault as stories, since that’s how things actually happen in my brain, around certain subject, interconnected.

Don’t confuse it with the other three lists — each answers a different question:

• Plans — what matters and is in progress, vault-wide (this file)
• Focus point — what Alexandre himself is doing next (personal action items), when something goes from any todo list anywhere it doesn’t pass by being marked done it just gets deleted.
• Todo for AI / Conductor — work queued for an agent to execute (dispatch, not status)

When a session’s work turns something into a real, ongoing, important initiative — wherever in the vault it lives — add the one-line pointer here in the same edit, the same way a new note gets its generated-by frontmatter in the edit that creates it, not as a follow-up.

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

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.
Tags and Frontmatter — what a tag obliges vs. what a frontmatter key obliges. Don’t confuse the two: a tag can apply to part of a note, a frontmatter key (like categories:) is for the whole note.