Obsidian skills and other tools for notes and planning

Obsidian skills teach an agent your note formats and tools so it can write to a vault without breaking links or syntax. The wider productivity category also covers planning interviews, ticket workflows, project management packs and workplace suites. We reviewed 28 skills: 13 get an install verdict and 15 come with caveats.

The common thread is access to your own workspace: files, calendars, mail, issue trackers. That makes each skill’s permissions the first thing to read, ahead of its feature list.

What to look for in Obsidian skills and other productivity skills

Check what the skill reads and writes. A format skill for Obsidian Markdown or Canvas files only needs your vault folder. A workplace suite that sends mail or edits shared documents acts under your account, and one wrong instruction reaches other people. Look for skills that confirm before sending or deleting.

Then check the tooling. Several skills are thin front ends for a separate CLI, so most of the capability and most of the risk sit in a binary you install. The skill text may be well written while the tool is outside our review. Third, check for interviews: skills that ask you questions are good for planning but cannot run unattended.

Of the 28 skills, 8 are clean, 14 are marked “review” and 6 have broad access. The security page explains the labels. The official guidance on skills from other sources is to read their scripts and dependencies before enabling them.

Recommended productivity skills

• Obsidian Skills is the Obsidian pick: six skills by Steph Ango (kepano) for Obsidian Markdown, Bases, JSON Canvas, the Obsidian CLI, Defuddle and Knap. They are Markdown only, with no scripts and no pre-approved tools. The companion CLIs install separately, and Defuddle and Knap need Node 20 or newer. It has about 406,000 recorded installs. It covers file formats and tools, not a memory system.
• obsidian-wiki goes further with 40 skills that build and maintain a linked vault from your notes, code and past sessions, answering with citations. Its CLI registers session hooks unless you pass --no-hooks. See our memory skills for the longer comparison.
• grilling is a clean 2.6 KB interview loop: numbered questions with a recommended answer each, until no branch is open. It is the engine behind the popular grill-me skill, which only points to it. It waits for you every round.
• Lark CLI is the official Lark and Feishu tool with about 29 agent skills for messaging, docs, sheets, calendar, mail and tasks. Skills carry safety rules, such as confirming before sending mail, but the agent acts with your user permissions once you authorize it. Useful only if your team uses Lark.
• PM Skills Marketplace is a clean set of 69 product management skills and 42 command workflows in nine plugins. It has no integrations with PM tools.

One to handle with care is wayfinder: it plans a large effort as decision tickets on your issue tracker, and it creates, comments on and closes issues, so it carries a broad access label.

For note-based agent memory, read memory skills; for planning and TDD, see workflow skills. The category page lists all 28, and how we review covers the scoring.