duncans-daily-notes

duncans-daily-notes

A Claude Code plugin that turns your coding sessions into daily notes in an Obsidian vault, automatically.

What it does

• /daily-note skill — generates today's daily note at $OBSIDIAN_VAULT/daily-notes/YYYY-MM-DD.md, carrying forward unchecked wrap-up tasks from the previous day and folding in session extractions from today.
• Stop hook — after every Claude Code session, extracts structured knowledge (decisions, learnings, research, project updates, open questions) to a per-session JSON file in ~/.claude/obsidian-staging/YYYY-MM-DD/.
• Nightly synthesis (cron) — at 22:00 local time, a claude -p agent reads all staged extractions, writes them into the vault (daily notes, project notes, research notes), and (if the vault is a git repo) commits + pushes.

Requirements

• Claude Code
• An Obsidian vault (just a directory of markdown files)
• jq, python3, bash, and crontab on your PATH

Install

# 1. Add the plugin
/plugin marketplace add duncanfinney/duncans-daily-notes
/plugin install duncans-daily-notes@duncanfinney

# 2. Point it at your vault
export OBSIDIAN_VAULT="$HOME/path/to/your/vault"
echo 'export OBSIDIAN_VAULT="$HOME/path/to/your/vault"' >> ~/.zshrc

# 3. Install the cron entry for nightly synthesis
#    (the Stop hook installs automatically with the plugin)
cd "$(claude-code-plugin-path duncans-daily-notes)" 2>/dev/null \
  || cd ~/.claude/plugins/cache/*/duncans-daily-notes/*/
./install.sh

Usage

/daily-note

Run once at the start of your day. The skill will:

1. Check if today's note already exists (if yes, merge new extractions in — doesn't overwrite)
2. Pull forward unchecked tasks from the previous day's ## Wrap-up
3. Read any already-staged session extractions for today and populate ## Work Log, ## Notes, ## Wrap-up
4. Write the note

You can edit the note during the day. New sessions that end after you run /daily-note will stage more extractions; running /daily-note again folds those in without clobbering your edits.

Layout

duncans-daily-notes/
├── .claude-plugin/plugin.json
├── hooks/hooks.json                     # Stop → obsidian-extract.sh
├── skills/daily-note/SKILL.md
├── scripts/
│   ├── obsidian-extract.sh              # per-session extraction (hook)
│   ├── obsidian-synthesize.sh           # nightly synthesis (cron)
│   └── obsidian-synthesize-prompt.txt   # system prompt for synthesis
└── install.sh                           # sets up the cron entry

Configuration

Env var	Required	Description
OBSIDIAN_VAULT	yes	Absolute path to your Obsidian vault directory

Make sure OBSIDIAN_VAULT is exported in your shell rc (.zshrc/.bashrc) so the Stop hook inherits it when Claude Code launches.

Backfill

You can extract an older session manually:

./scripts/obsidian-extract.sh <SESSION_ID> [YYYY-MM-DD]

And synthesize any date:

./scripts/obsidian-synthesize.sh 2025-12-31

With no args, obsidian-synthesize.sh scans every dated staging dir and synthesizes them all — if a nightly run is missed, the next one backfills automatically.

Uninstall

/plugin uninstall duncans-daily-notes
crontab -l | grep -v obsidian-synthesize.sh | crontab -

License

MIT — see LICENSE.