Obsidian Skills (kepano) Review
Steph Ango's curated skills for managing Obsidian vaults from Claude Code — atomic notes, link hygiene, and structured writing pipelines.
What it is
Obsidian Skills is a small, opinionated collection of Claude Code skills for working with Obsidian vaults. Built by Steph Ango (kepano), CEO of Obsidian, it codifies how he thinks about atomic notes, link hygiene, and writing flows — and lets Claude do that work for you.
What it actually does
If you keep your knowledge in Obsidian, the friction isn't capture — it's the editorial work of keeping the vault healthy. Splitting bloated notes into atomic ones, surfacing missing backlinks, refactoring sloppy structure into something searchable, drafting from notes without losing the source. These are tedious enough that most people stop doing them, and the vault degrades into a dump.
These skills hand that work to Claude. There are skills for atomic-note refactoring, for link auditing, for converting raw note dumps into draft prose, for structured journaling. Each one is small, readable, and reflects opinions you can take or leave — but the opinions are good ones, road-tested by someone who runs the company that ships the tool.
For anyone whose primary thinking surface is Obsidian and whose Claude Code workflow already exists, this is a 30-minute install that immediately makes both surfaces work better together.
When to use it
- You use Obsidian as your primary note-taking / writing tool.
- You want Claude to help maintain vault hygiene without you writing the skills yourself.
- You write longer-form content that flows out of notes and want a draft pipeline.
- You like reading other people's working skill sets to learn the format.
When NOT to use it
- You don't use Obsidian — these are unhelpful elsewhere.
- You have a deeply customized vault structure that opinionated skills will fight.
- You expect a polished product — this is a personal working set, not a maintained framework.
Pros
- Author runs Obsidian, so the skills reflect deep familiarity with how the tool actually works.
- Small, focused set — quality over quantity.
- Free and easy to fork into your own vault-specific variants.
Cons
- Opinionated to the point of friction if your vault doesn't match the kepano style.
- Limited scope — covers vault management, not Obsidian's full plugin ecosystem.
- Personal repo — durability and cadence depend on one person's interest.
Use Obsidian Skills if you keep your thinking in Obsidian and want Claude to help maintain the vault; skip it if you don't use Obsidian or your vault is too customized to adopt outside opinions.
Install / access
git clone https://github.com/kepano/obsidian-skills.git ~/obsidian-skills && cp -r ~/obsidian-skills/<skill> ~/.claude/skills/