Participated in public demo 2603 with Obsidian research helper
May 1, 2026

The problem [00:00] Percy is a researcher juggling several ongoing projects, each requiring its own literature review. He typically does a deep review at a project's outset, but once he's absorbed in building, he stops re-checking, leaving him unaware of newly published work or of how the project's own focus has shifted, a blind spot that widens the longer the project runs. He found this wasn't unique to him; several research friends shared the same problem. What they built [04:58] He built an "Obsidian Research Helper" skill for the OpenClaw agent framework: rather than building a custom agent, he built a tool layer, an Obsidian CLI wrapped in a Python script, that lets any existing agent traverse his notes' wikilinks, search arXiv, rank results against his research context, and write a summary newsletter into his daily note, while deliberately keeping the agent from touching the filesystem directly so it's forced through the wikilink graph. What happened [07:10] The end-to-end run produced a newsletter linked from his daily note, listing his active research projects alongside a ranked set of high- and medium-relevance papers (each linked to the source), plus suggestions for how to adapt his current projects in light of that related work. The ask [07:57] His stated next step is improving evaluation, particularly generalizing the tool to other researchers' Obsidian notes.
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