External Source → Obsidian Sync

Search an external knowledge source for articles relevant to current areas of focus and create corresponding notes in the Obsidian vault at ~/Documents/obsidian-vault/.

The Obsidian vault is the preferred workspace for user/model collaboration. The external source (e.g. Notion, Confluence, Google Docs) is upstream. This skill bridges the two — pulling relevant content into the vault where it becomes part of the interlinked knowledge graph.

Note: This skill template uses Notion as the example external source. Replace the MCP tool calls (mcp__notion__notion-search, mcp__notion__notion-fetch) with whatever API your external source exposes.

Procedure

1. Determine Areas of Focus

Identify what to search for by reading the vault:

• Read the most recent daily note(s) to find active work, backlog items, and session topics.
• Run a tag-line grep (^# across the vault) to get the current topic landscape.
• Derive 3–8 search queries from: active projects, services under development, open decisions, backlog items, and architectural themes.

If invoked with an explicit topic (e.g. /external-sync auth service), use that as the primary focus and derive 1–2 additional related queries from vault context.

2. Search the External Source

For each area of focus, search the external source with a focused semantic query.

Collect candidate pages — titles, IDs, and snippet context. Discard results that are clearly irrelevant.

3. Deduplicate Against the Vault

Before fetching any page, check whether a corresponding note already exists in the vault:

• Grep for the page URL or title in existing vault notes.
• If a vault note already links to the same page (via its **Source**: line), skip it unless the user explicitly asked for a refresh.

4. Preview and Confirm

Do not write any vault notes yet. Present the user with:

1. A TLDR for each high-value page — 2–3 sentences summarising what the page contains and why it's relevant to current work.
2. A proposed sync plan — table of pages to sync vs skip, with reasoning:

| Page | Action | Proposed vault name | Tags | Reason |
|------|--------|---------------------|------|--------|
| Auth Architecture | Sync | auth-architecture.md | #architecture #service/auth #external | Design doc for auth service |
| Sprint Retro Notes | Skip | — | — | Not relevant to current work |

3. Ask for confirmation — wait for the user to approve, request changes, or ask questions before proceeding.

Only proceed to step 5 after the user confirms.

5. Fetch and Transform

For each approved page, fetch its full content.

Transform into a vault note following all PKM conventions:

1. H1 title — use a clear, descriptive title.
2. Tags on line 2 — apply the vault's tag taxonomy. Always include a source tag (e.g. #external or #notion) to mark the note's origin.
3. Source line — immediately after tags, add:

   **Source**: [<page title>](<URL>)
   

4. Overview paragraph — a concise summary of the page's content and why it's relevant.
5. Structured content — distill the page into well-structured markdown. Do not blindly copy — reorganise and condense for the vault's conventions.
6. Wiki-links — link to existing vault notes wherever concepts overlap. This is critical for integrating synced content into the knowledge graph.

6. Report

After syncing, output a summary:

## Sync Summary

**Queries searched**: <list>
**Pages found**: <N>
**Notes created**: <N>
**Skipped (already in vault)**: <N>

### New notes
- [[note-name]] — one-line description (from: <page title>)

Constraints

• External source is read-only — never create or modify pages in the external source.
• Vault conventions are mandatory — every note created must follow the PKM skill's conventions (flat structure, tags, wiki-links, naming).
• Don't duplicate — if the vault already has a note covering the same content, prefer adding a **Source**: link to the existing note rather than creating a duplicate.
• Condense, don't dump — external pages can be verbose. Distill to what's useful.
• Prefer quality over quantity — it's better to sync 3 high-value notes than 15 shallow ones.
• Source of truth chain — codebase > external page > vault note. If a vault note from the external source conflicts with the codebase, the codebase wins. The vault note should flag the discrepancy.
• Always preview first — never write vault notes without showing the user what will be synced and getting confirmation.

Usage

/external-sync                    # Auto-detect areas of focus from vault, search and sync
/external-sync <topic>            # Search for a specific topic and sync relevant pages
/external-sync refresh <topic>    # Re-sync even if notes already exist (updates existing notes)