TARS
TARS is an Obsidian-native persistent executive assistant for senior knowledge workers. It turns an Obsidian vault into a long-lived operating system for meetings, memory, tasks, briefings, strategic thinking, and stakeholder communication.
TARS is built around a few core ideas:
- Obsidian is the runtime workspace, not an export target.
obsidian-cli is the write interface for vault content.- TARS-managed notes use schema-validated
tars- frontmatter properties.
- Live Obsidian Bases replace hand-maintained
_index.md files.
- Meeting answers can fall back to archived raw transcripts when summaries are not enough.
- Tasks and durable memory always go through review before persistence.
What ships in the framework
The framework ships with 12 skills, 11 commands, 15 templates, 15 live views, and 8 deterministic scripts.
Core user-facing capabilities:
- Daily and weekly briefings with calendar, task, people, and initiative context
- Meeting processing that links transcripts, journal notes, decisions, and follow-through
- Task extraction with accountability testing and duplicate checks
- Durable memory capture for people, initiatives, decisions, products, vendors, competitors, and organizational context
- Fast lookup across memory, journal, transcripts, and configured integrations
- Strategic analysis, communications drafting, initiative planning, and maintenance workflows
Architecture at a glance
The framework uses this high-level structure:
skills/ Behavioral and workflow protocols
commands/ Thin slash-command wrappers into the skills
_system/ Runtime configuration, schemas, guardrails, alias registry, state
_views/ Obsidian `.base` files for live queries
templates/ Canonical TARS note templates
scripts/ Deterministic validators and maintenance utilities
.claude/skills/ Obsidian-specific helper skills used by the agent
A deployed TARS vault uses this runtime layout:
memory/ Durable knowledge graph
journal/YYYY-MM/ Skill outputs and dated notes
contexts/ Deep reference material and generated artifacts
inbox/pending/ Raw intake waiting for processing
inbox/processed/ Processed intake awaiting later maintenance
archive/transcripts/ Preserved transcript notes with journal backlinks
Legacy directories or compatibility files may still exist in some checkouts for migration context, but the active runtime source of truth lives in the current system files and workflow definitions.
Quick start
- Install the framework from the marketplace or from a local checkout.
- Make sure Obsidian Desktop is running and
obsidian-cli is installed.
- Point TARS at an Obsidian vault dedicated to your TARS workspace.
- Run
/welcome to scaffold the vault, configure integrations, and initialize system files.
- Start with
/briefing, /meeting, /tasks, /answer, or natural-language requests.
Examples:
/welcome
/briefing
/meeting
/tasks
/answer What do I know about the platform rewrite?
/think Stress-test this roadmap decision.
How TARS behaves
TARS is designed to preserve signal and avoid silent drift:
- It checks the vault before writing and classifies findings as NEW, UPDATE, REDUNDANT, or CONTRADICTS.
- It uses the durability test before proposing memory persistence.
- It uses the accountability test before proposing tasks.
- It preserves transcript text so later queries can inspect what was actually said.
- It records framework issues and user improvement ideas in
_system/backlog/.
- It performs scheduled or session-start maintenance to keep schemas, links, and archival state healthy.
Documentation map
Start here depending on what you need:
License
This repository is licensed under PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0. See LICENSE.
ajayjohn