Obsidian Starter Kit v4 Is Live: The AI-Native Release Is Here
Obsidian Starter Kit v4 is out. Hundreds of AI skills, dozens of agents, persistent memory, LLM Wikis, a CLI, an MCP server, and a brand-new plugin that powers it all.
Hundreds of AI skills. 10+ AI agents. One vault that runs itself; while you do the deep thinking.
⏰ Heads up: the Obsidian Starter Kit price goes up in 48 hours. If you buy now, you lock in the current price and get all future updates for free.
Introduction
Dwayne Appleby
If you've been waiting for the "right time" to jump in, this is it.
OSK v4 is the AI-native release. Not "AI as a bolt-on chat window". AI as part of the system. Agents with persistent identity. Tons of skills you can use to slice, dice and organize knowledge. Memory that compounds across sessions. A plugin that exposes your vault's structure to any AI tool you connect. All with a deep philosophy to avoid turning your vault into AI slop.
As I mentioned in a recent article, PKM is the missing foundation for many people and also for their AI agents. OSK has been at the core of my PKM practice for many years. And now it's also a solid foundation for your AI Agents!
Let's dive in 🚀
TL;DR
- OSK v4 is AI-native by default; AI agents, skills, memory, and LLM Wikis are built into the vault
- Ships the new Obsidian Starter Kit plugin with a CLI and an MCP server. Your vault becomes addressable by any AI tool
- 375 specialized AI skills and various AI agents (Editor, Researcher, Skeptic, Coach, Ghostwriter, Wiki Curator, and many more) live inside the vault ready to follow your orders
- New plugins for journaling, life tracking, data recovery, knowledge graph exploration, and more. At the same time, this release cuts the "fat"; I've removed ~30 plugins to keep the baseline lean
- A clear AI Augmentation Philosophy describing my system's stance on what AI does for you and what only you can do
- A new user identity layer helping AI really understand you
- 15+ new tutorials covering AI sessions, identity layer, voice profile, LLM Wikis, weekly/quarterly/yearly reviews, building your own agents and skills
- The price goes up in 48 hours. Buy now to lock in the current price and get v4 for free
🔗 https://www.store.dsebastien.net/product/obsidian-starter-kit
Why You Should Care
Most people use AI like a slot machine. They paste a prompt, pull the lever, get something back, copy it into a note, and move on. The next session starts from zero. No memory. No context. No accumulation.
That's the AI-as-chatbot model. It scales output, not understanding.
OSK v4 takes the opposite approach. AI agents live IN the vault. They read your notes, your goals, your voice profile, your values, your habits, your decisions. They remember what worked and what didn't. They write to the same vault you read from. The result is an AI that compounds with your knowledge, not against it.
I've been refining this approach for the past year, against my own 20,000+ note vault, with real workflows, real content, real customers, real outcomes. v4 is the version where it all becomes available to you as a coherent system.
The Philosophy First
I want you to read this before you touch the AI side of OSK; the new AI Augmentation Philosophy.
The core idea is simple. AI augments thinking. It does not replace it.
Writing is thinking. The act of writing forces clarity, exposes gaps, makes the structure of an idea visible to its own author. A vault entirely written by AI is a vault with no knower behind it. And to me, that's completely meaningless.
I love everything that AI enables, but I do not want to outsource my understanding. And I don't want to mix what I've taken time to elaborate and what AI generates for me. That's why OSK v4 clearly organizes, labels & isolates AI generated content by default.
As Andrej Karpathy put it:
You can outsource your thinking, but you can't outsource your understanding
What's New in v4
Far too much to cover in one article. Here are the highlights.
The OSK Plugin (the heart of v4)
A new plugin called the Obsidian Starter Kit plugin ships with the kit and powers everything else. It enables clearly defining note types, properties, required/optional/allowed values, tags, folders, and templates as structured data.
This new plugin replaces the Metadata Menu plugin for Obsidian and turns Obsidian into a strongly typed knowledge base.
It also includes a Command Line Interface (CLI) (osk-cli) for scripting and a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server so any AI tool (like Claude Code, Claude Cowork, Codex, etc) can talk to your vault directly with full understanding about the whole system. Your knowledge becomes addressable. Your AI becomes context-aware. As far as I know this is the first plugin of this kind for Obsidian.
The system is pre-configured with many note types, but you can also add your own and customize everything.
In addition, the plugin also includes automation features:
Read the reference for the full details.
Hundreds of AI Skills
OSK v4 ships ~375 AI skills. Each one is a focused capability with a clear contract.
These skills provide powerful tools that AI can use to do research, organize and tag your notes, find relevant connections, explore ideas, help you manage tasks, prioritize, and a lot more.
Here's AI at work inside an OSK vault:
OSK v4 includes hundreds of AI skills that add more determinism in the way AI works. Also key is the portability of those AI Skills. This is something I care about and focused heavily on. All the included skills respect the recommendations I've shared in this article:
Sebastien Dubois
A small sample of the categories:
- 🧠 Thinking:
osk-thinking-first-principles,osk-thinking-premortem,osk-thinking-red-team,osk-thinking-steelman,osk-thinking-inversion - ✍️ Writing:
osk-writing-note-writer,osk-writing-voice-profile,osk-writing-humanizer,osk-writing-rigor,osk-writing-skill-creator - 🔬 Research:
osk-research-topic-brief,osk-research-thesis,osk-readwise-ingest-full,osk-research-arxiv - 📚 Wiki:
osk-wiki-create,osk-wiki-ingest,osk-wiki-explore,osk-wiki-graduate,osk-wiki-lint - 🗂️ Vault:
osk-vault-audit,osk-vault-link,osk-vault-orphan-rescue,osk-vault-prune - 🧭 Identity & Reflection:
osk-identity-interview,osk-identity-stranger,osk-identity-reflect,osk-identity-life-event - 🎯 Action:
osk-action-goal-decompose,osk-action-project-planner,osk-task-management,osk-task-dashboard - 🌅 Rituals:
osk-ritual-daily-checkin,osk-ritual-weekly-planning,osk-ritual-period-end - 🩺 Health:
osk-health-checkin,osk-health-garmin-sync,osk-health-research,osk-sports-coach - 🔭 Discovery:
osk-discovery-surface,osk-discovery-rabbit-hole,osk-knowledge-fact-check
And a LOT more. Want to find one? Just ask. The osk-meta-skill-finder skill routes any natural-language request to the right one.
Dozens of Specialized Agents
OSK v4 also comes with specialized AI agents, each with a persistent (customizable) identity, a memory, etc.
A few examples (the full list lives in the Agents registry):
- 🧑💼 Personal Assistant: calendar, tasks, daily planning, email triage
- 🧘 Coach: weekly reviews, goal tracking, accountability
- ✍️ Ghostwriter: writes in your voice using your Voice Profile
- 📝 OSK Agent Editor: structure, clarity, flow, grammar
- 🤬 OSK Agent Hater: stress-tests your arguments
- 🔍 OSK Agent Researcher: deep dives across vault, Readwise, and web
- 🧪 OSK Agent Skeptic: tests claims, surfaces fallacies, evaluates evidence
- 🩺 Health Advisor / Health Coach / Sports Coach: the boundary between analysis, lifestyle coaching, and training design
- 📚 OSK Wiki Curator: builds and maintains LLM Wikis for you
Plus panels that combine agents for multi-angle review (publish review, debate, health check), teams for parallel work, and councils for hard decisions.
My approach with AI agents is to create as few as I can while empowering each of those with many specialized AI skills. It's something I've discussed here:
Sebastien Dubois
Last but not least, whenever you start a new AI conversation/session, you will first discuss with the AI receptionist, which knows exactly where to redirect you. This one implements the Receptionist AI Design Pattern I've described a while ago.
BONUS: I've also added a new "AI" Obsidian Base that helps managing all AI Agents & AI Skills.
The Identity Layer
In V4, I've also introduced a Personal Identity System; a way to describe various aspects of your life and career. Your achievements, challenges, fears, failures & lessons, needs, values, beliefs, communication style, education, goals, vision, etc.
This system helps AI fully understand who you are, who you want to become, your recurring patterns, your preferences, etc. This is the layer that turns a generic AI assistant into a really personal one that knows you.
BONUS: I've also added a "Me" Obsidian Base to manage it all in one place.
AI conversations
OSK v4 also has a space where AI sessions/conversations can be stored. Many people don't "manage" their AI sessions. Those are lost in some hidden folder on their machine and on AI platforms, and they never realize that those are highly valuable. OSK v4 enables you to capture, organize and leverage those.
I'll write more about why this matters, but the gist of it is that your past conversations with AI are full of insights, lessons learned, workflows and processes that you actually need to try and extract and leverage.
LLM Wikis (one of my favorites)
Inspired by Andrej Karpathy's LLM Knowledge Base pattern, LLM Wikis are AI-maintained knowledge bases that live inside your vault. You drop in sources; the LLM compiles, cross-references, tracks confidence, flags contradictions, and maintains the index for you. Every claim traces back to a source. The wiki grows as you feed it. Read the LLM Wiki System note for the full picture.
In OSK v4, there's a dedicated space and note types for LLM wikis/entries, as well as AI skills and a new Graph Explorer plugin that makes exploration much more enjoyable.
A wiki at a glance:
An individual wiki article, with sources and confidence tracking:
And the Graph Explorer view to navigate connections visually:
Check out my article on this topic:
Sebastien Dubois
BONUS: V4 also includes a new AI Wikis Obsidian Base.
A New Plugin Baseline
In V4, I've removed or disabled a ton of plugins. Many of those were useful, but not essential. Some customers found the whole a bit overwhelming, and so I decided to create a lighter baseline with fewer moving parts.
But I've also added new highly valuable plugins that I've created in the past few months. The standouts:
- Journal Bases for efficient Periodic reviews
- Documentation: https://dsebastien.github.io/obsidian-journal-base/
- Life Tracker for capturing and visualizing your health/exercise/life data
- Time Machine for easily recovering notes/note content (no more lost work)
- Documentation: https://dsebastien.github.io/obsidian-time-machine/
- Graph Explorer Base View for interactive graphs on top of any Obsidian Base. Explore ideas more easily and visualize your progress
- Expander plugin for Obsidian for replacing pieces of data across your vault without having to duplicate information
- Documentation: https://dsebastien.github.io/obsidian-expander/
You can find more details about these in the release notes.
Journal Bases in action for periodic reviews:
Life Tracker for capturing and visualizing health data:
Time Machine for recovering lost work:
And Much More
And there's so much more in V4... New tutorials, new bases, a new "Dispatcher" Templater template, new global properties, new daily-note tracking fields, qmd support, Obsidian CLI support, etc. The list goes on. The full record is in the v4.0.0 release notes.
A quick visual tour
A solid, scalable folder structure that organizes itself:
The daily note as your single entry point:
First-class Obsidian Bases support with many bases included out of the box:
A full action system to manage goals, plans, projects, and meetings:
Advanced task management with TaskNotes:
Capture and visualize your health and habits:
For the full picture of what's inside the vault, head over to the Obsidian Starter Kit screenshots.
I'll publish new videos explaining the new features. If you don't want to miss those, then don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel:
Two Ways to Get In
1. Buy the Obsidian Starter Kit directly
Best if you want OSK and nothing else.
- Essentials (vault + user guide): €199.99
- Premium (Essentials + Obsidian Starter Course): €249.99
⏰ Both prices go up in 48 hours. Buy now to lock in the current price; you get v4 for free, and every future version is also free. Buy once, free updates forever.
Dwayne Appleby🔗 https://www.store.dsebastien.net/product/obsidian-starter-kit/
2. Join the Knowii Community (and get OSK as a bonus)
Best if you want more than just the vault.
The Knowii Community is the central hub of my work. Community, courses, products, masterminds, peer support, direct access to me. Two membership tiers include OSK at no extra cost:
- Knowledge Builder (€59.99/quarter, €199.99/year): includes the full Obsidian Starter Kit AND the Obsidian Starter Course as bonuses (~€270 in value). Plus the community, member directory, events, premium resources.
- Knowledge Master (€119.99/quarter, €399.99/year): includes ALL the above plus Knowledge Management for Beginners, the Knowledge Worker Kit, the PKM Library, experimental content, masterminds. ~€700 in value.
Sofia
🔗 https://www.store.dsebastien.net/product/knowii-community/
Conclusion
OSK v4 is a version I'm really proud of. It's the culmination of months of work in the shadows, constructing a really valuable AI Assistant that I couldn't find anywhere. Every single AI session now begins in my Obsidian vault. AI knows about me, my projects, my plans, my goals, my tasks, etc. And I also use this system to run my entire business. It's certainly not perfect, but it's SOLID, and it scales; just like the rest of the OSK system.
My favorite way to think about the new AI support is this: AI does the plumbing so you can do the thinking.
If you've been on the fence, the next 48 hours are the cheapest entry point you'll get. After that, the price goes up.
Don't sit on this one. Lock it in, fill in your identity layer, run osk-meta-onboarding, and let the system start working for you.
That's it for today! ✨
About Sébastien
I'm Sébastien Dubois, and I'm on a mission to help knowledge workers escape information overload. After 20+ years in IT and seeing too many brilliant minds drowning in digital chaos, I've decided to help people build systems that actually work. Through the Knowii Community, my courses, products & services and my Website/Newsletter, I share practical and battle-tested systems.
I write about Knowledge Work, Personal Knowledge Management, Note-taking, Lifelong Learning, Personal Organization, Productivity, and more. I also craft lovely digital products and tools.
If you want to follow my work, then become a member and join our community.
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