Knowledge managementskill

Periodic vault-hygiene sweep agent

Vaults past 5K files quietly rot (broken links, naming drift, duplicates). A periodic agent sweep proposes hygiene moves to confirm.

TierBMedium — Solid coverage with concrete examples
EffortS · Days
Forfounder · knowledge worker · anyone with a large vault

What

A skill that walks the entire vault and proposes hygiene operations: rename files that violate the naming convention, move misfiled notes, remove duplicates, fix broken bidirectional links, archive items older than N months with no incoming references. Always proposes a diff first; applies only on confirmation.

Why it matters

A vault that grows past ~5K files quietly rots — links break, naming drift accumulates, duplicates multiply. A founder running an AI-native operations cohort admitted: "Hygiene is everyone's responsibility, but rarely happens — even I'm bad at it." A periodic agent-driven sweep is the only realistic way to keep a 15-20K file vault navigable.

End-to-end

  1. Codify your naming convention as a markdown file in the vault root.
  2. Write a world-clean skill that takes inputs: naming convention path, vault root, dry-run flag.
  3. Steps the skill performs: scan all files; group by violations (bad name, missing frontmatter, broken link, duplicate hash); emit a proposed-changes report; on confirm, apply with bidirectional-link preservation (Obsidian backlink syntax).
  4. Run dry-run weekly; apply quarterly.
  5. Always commit the vault before running. This is a recovery point.
  6. Keep an audit log of what the skill renamed/moved — future-you needs it.

Gotchas

  • Auto-apply without preview eats important files. The skill must always emit a diff and demand confirmation; the team that skipped this lost half a vault to a Dropbox-sync cascade.

Tools

  • A vault with consistent naming convention
  • Skill or agent capable of file ops with diff preview
  • Git history on the vault as a safety net