Ufuk's Notes

Vault automations

3 min read

Vault automations

On-demand scripts for recurring vault chores. Both run with plain Python 3 — no dependencies.

Commands

Walks Highlights/ for files modified in the lookback window, then adds inline [[wikilinks]] wherever a known title or alias from People/, Organizations/, Products/, Wiki/, or Artifacts/ appears.

# Dry run — no files touched, writes a report to _automation/reports/
python3 _automation/link_highlights.py
 
# Custom window
python3 _automation/link_highlights.py --days 14
 
# Apply the changes for real
python3 _automation/link_highlights.py --apply
 
# Smoke-test on a handful of files
python3 _automation/link_highlights.py --limit 20 --verbose

Matching rules

  • Whole-word, case-insensitive against filenames and aliases: from frontmatter.
  • Longest match wins (so Tony Fadell is linked, not just Tony).
  • Skips: existing [[wikilinks]], markdown links, code blocks, inline code, URLs, HTML comments, and frontmatter.
  • A small stoplist of generic words is excluded (the, data, model, etc.).
  • Surface forms shorter than 3 chars are excluded.

Output

A timestamped report at _automation/reports/link_highlights_<ts>_<dryrun|applied>.md listing every proposed (or applied) link, the file and line number, and a preview of the line.

2. Weekly review digest

Generates a Markdown digest of recent highlight activity and writes it to Calendar/Weekly Reviews/{YYYY-Www} Weekly Review.md.

# Default: last 7 days, write to Calendar/
python3 _automation/weekly_review.py
 
# Custom window
python3 _automation/weekly_review.py --days 14
 
# Print to stdout instead of writing the file
python3 _automation/weekly_review.py --stdout

The digest contains:

  • New highlights by source — counts per source folder (Books, Articles, Podcasts, Tweets, …).
  • Top items — the most recently modified files in each source.
  • Open loops & questions — lines from this week’s highlights that end in ?, contain TODO/FIXME/TBD, or are wrapped in ==Obsidian highlight markers==.

Asking Cowork to run them

You can just say things like:

  • “Link my recent highlights” → runs the linker in dry-run, shows you the report
  • “Apply the highlight links from that report” → runs with --apply
  • “Generate this week’s review” → runs the weekly digest and opens the file
  • “Show me open loops from the last two weeks” → runs the digest with --days 14 --stdout

How “recent” is determined

Both scripts read the modified: field in each highlight’s YAML frontmatter (ISO date, e.g. modified: 2026-05-01). If a file has no modified: field, the filesystem mtime is used as a fallback.

Adjusting behavior

The scripts are intentionally short and dependency-free. Common tweaks:

  • Stoplist — STOPLIST set near the top of link_highlights.py. Add anything you don’t want auto-linked.
  • Linkable folders — LINKABLE_DIRS in link_highlights.py. Add or remove folders.
  • Open-loop heuristics — extract_open_loops() in weekly_review.py. Adjust the regex set if you flag loops differently.

Graph View

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