daily-note

Daily Note Generator

Generate a daily note at $OBSIDIAN_VAULT/daily-notes/YYYY-MM-DD.md.

Vault location

This skill reads the vault path from the OBSIDIAN_VAULT environment variable. If unset, ask the user to export it before continuing. Example:

export OBSIDIAN_VAULT="$HOME/obsidian-notes"

Throughout this document, $VAULT refers to the value of that variable. Substitute it when building file paths.

Pipeline context

Two scripts feed this skill automatically — you do not run them, but you read what they produce:

• scripts/obsidian-extract.sh (shipped in this plugin) — fires via Stop hook after every Claude session. Writes per-session structured JSON (decisions, learnings, research, project_updates, open_questions) to ~/.claude/obsidian-staging/YYYY-MM-DD/SESSION_ID.json.
• scripts/obsidian-synthesize.sh (shipped in this plugin) — runs via cron at 22:00 daily. Reads all dated staging dirs, writes into the vault (daily notes, project/research notes), commits+pushes (if the vault is a git repo), then deletes staging on success.

Implication: when the skill runs mid-day, ~/.claude/obsidian-staging/YYYY-MM-DD/ contains today's session extractions that have not yet been synthesized. Use them as the source of truth for the Work Log / Notes / Wrap-up sections. A missing or empty dir means no sessions have ended yet today.

Prerequisites

• Invoke the obsidian:obsidian-markdown skill before generating content to ensure correct Obsidian syntax.

Steps

1. Determine today's date

Use the current date from system context. Format as YYYY-MM-DD.

2. Check if today's note already exists

Use Glob to check for $VAULT/daily-notes/YYYY-MM-DD.md (substituting today's date).

• If the file exists: Read it, tell the user "Today's daily note already exists at $VAULT/daily-notes/YYYY-MM-DD.md", then continue to step 3 so you can merge in any new staged extractions produced since the note was last written. Preserve the user's existing hand-written content; only add new items. Skip to step 7 (merge instead of overwrite).
• If it does not exist: Continue to step 3.

3. Find the most recent previous daily note

Search for the most recent daily note before today:

1. Compute yesterday's date and check $VAULT/daily-notes/YESTERDAY.md.
2. If not found, continue checking each day going back up to 7 days total.
3. If no note is found within 7 days, skip to step 5 with no carry-forward items.

4. Extract carry-forward items

Read the previous daily note found in step 3. Parse it to find the ## Wrap-up section.

Extract all unchecked task lines from the Wrap-up section only:

• Include lines matching - [ ] followed by any text
• Exclude checked tasks (- [x])
• Exclude non-task lines (plain bullets, text, blank lines)
• Stop extracting when you hit the next ## heading or end of file

If the Wrap-up section is empty or has no unchecked tasks, proceed with no carry-forward items.

5. Read staged extractions for today

Check ~/.claude/obsidian-staging/YYYY-MM-DD/ (today's date).

• If the dir does not exist or contains no non-empty *.json files: no context to fold in — proceed to step 6 with no extracted items.
• Otherwise: Read every non-empty SESSION_ID.json in that dir. Each file has fields: working_directory, branch, decisions[], learnings[], research[], project_updates[], open_questions[].

Also check ~/.claude/obsidian-staging/YESTERDAY/ (the previous day's staging dir). If it still exists, yesterday's 22:00 synthesis did not run or did not succeed — include those sessions too, since that content would otherwise be lost.

Collate across all the JSON files you read:

• Work Log entries — group project_updates by working_directory (or a combined working_directory + branch if the same repo has multiple branches in play). Each group becomes an H3 subsection; each update is a bullet under it. Promote noteworthy items from decisions into the same subsections when they describe concrete changes.
• Notes — surface learnings and non-obvious decisions (rationale, gotchas, root causes) as plain bullets. Skip trivia.
• Wrap-up — turn open_questions into unchecked tasks (- [ ] ). Merge with anything obvious from decisions marked as deferred.
• Research — if a session has substantive research items and a logical fit exists, add a bullet under Notes; otherwise rely on obsidian-synthesize.sh to route them to research/ notes in the vault.

Skip 0-byte files and any file where jq -e '.decisions' fails — those are failed extractions.

6. Generate and write today's note

Build the daily note using this template. Replace YYYY-MM-DD with today's actual date. Omit sections that would be empty (e.g., no ## Notes if there are no learnings worth surfacing) — but always keep ## Plan, ## Work Log, ## Wrap-up.

---
date: YYYY-MM-DD
tags:
  - daily-note
---

## Plan
{each carry-forward item from step 4 on its own line, preserving the `- [ ] ` prefix}
- [ ] 

## Work Log

{H3 subsections grouped by working_directory / branch, with project_update bullets}

## Notes

{bullets from learnings + noteworthy decisions}

## Wrap-up
{open_questions as `- [ ] ` items}
- [ ] 

If there are no carry-forward items AND no staged extractions, fall back to the empty-section template (just the four headings with a single blank - [ ] under Plan and Wrap-up).

Write this content to $VAULT/daily-notes/YYYY-MM-DD.md using the Write tool.

7. Merge mode (if the note already existed)

If step 2 found an existing note, do NOT overwrite. Instead:

1. Parse the existing note's sections.
2. For each staged-extraction item (from step 5), check if it is already present (by substring match on the key identifier — PR number, file path, or the first ~40 chars of the description). Skip duplicates.
3. Append new Work Log bullets to the matching H3 subsection (create it if missing). Append new Notes bullets under ## Notes. Append new Wrap-up items under ## Wrap-up.
4. Use the Edit tool to make targeted section updates rather than rewriting the whole file.

8. Confirm to the user

Tell the user: "Created today's daily note at $VAULT/daily-notes/YYYY-MM-DD.md." (or "Updated" if merged).

If items were carried forward from a previous day, list them under: "Carried forward from $VAULT/daily-notes/PREV-DATE.md:"

If staged extractions were folded in, summarize briefly: "Folded in N session extractions from ~/.claude/obsidian-staging/YYYY-MM-DD/."