Compass turns an Obsidian vault into a life planner an AI agent can safely edit

Most productivity systems ask a person to keep the routine going by hand, so the routine falls over the first busy week. A GitHub project called Compass, which reached 694 stars in about a month and picked up a fresh burst of activity yesterday, replaces the willpower part with an AI agent that can read the vault and make careful edits.

Compass is a complete Obsidian vault template built by Daniel Agrici, released under MIT for the code and CC BY 4.0 for the prose, according to the repository's own README. The current version is v1.1.0, described there as a development candidate rather than a formal public release. Obsidian 1.13.1 or newer is required, and the agent bridge is desktop-only for now, with mobile support in testing.

What is in the vault

The template ships seven workflows: journalling with daily questions, quarterly retreats, multi-scale planning across the year, quarter, week and day, habit tracking, a daily reading loop, task management, and a writing board. A folder tree covers dashboards, journals, planning, projects, people, writing, reading, tasks and a knowledge library, with sample notes tagged so a new user can see the shape of the system before writing anything.

Ten Obsidian community plugins ship bundled: Dataview, Templater, Periodic Notes, QuickAdd, Tasks, Kanban, Omnisearch, Local REST API, Agent Client and an SEO plugin. Templates, build scripts and a verification pipeline are part of the repo, so the vault can be rebuilt from source rather than treated as a frozen dump.

Where the agent fits

The AI part is the piece that separates Compass from the many Obsidian starter vaults on the market. A file called AGENTS.md holds the instructions and safety rules the agent must follow, and 16 recurring prompt jobs sit in a Prompts folder as approval-based tasks: think weekly review, quarterly planning, a nudge to close open loops.

The vault reaches the agent through the Agent Client Protocol and a Local REST API MCP server, and the README says it supports Claude, Gemini through their local CLIs, and any client that speaks Agent Client Protocol. No API keys travel with the vault: they belong to the user. Edits from the agent land in the vault as diffs the user approves in a sidebar, so a bad suggestion cannot silently overwrite a journal entry.

Who this is for

The audience is anyone who already lives in Obsidian and wants an AI assistant that reads their notes and drafts their planning without exporting anything to a cloud service. Founders and product managers using Obsidian for weekly reviews get a starting shape they can adapt; a developer who already runs Claude Code or Codex on their machine gets a second workspace, this one for their own life rather than their codebase, using the same agent.

The star count is real. The rate, roughly 694 stars in the month since 26 August 2026, sits well above the level that used to earn a mention on this news feed and reflects how many people were waiting for an agent-native personal knowledge base with an approval gate built in.

Source

• Repository: AgriciDaniel/compass on GitHub