ai-life-skills

This vault will be a collection of skills I use with Claude Code to help improve my life in various ways. For best results I would recommend pairing this with an AI managed Obsidian vault. Right now I’m uploading just the summarize skill first and will update with the full vault setup soon.

Skills

• summarize/ — drop in a YouTube video, article, PDF, EPUB, or podcast and it writes a summary note into your vault with wikilinks to every person and concept mentioned

(more coming) (summarize-meeting, daily brief, daily news)

Install

Claude Code loads skills from ~/.claude/skills//. Clone this repo and symlink the skills you want:

git clone https://github.com//ai-life-skills ~/src/ai-life-skills
ln -s ~/src/ai-life-skills/summarize ~/.claude/skills/summarize

Then use /summarize in Claude Code.

Usage

For a YouTube video or article, paste the URL:

/summarize https://youtube.com/watch?v=...

It will summarize the content proportional to the length of the content unless specified otherwise. The purpose of this is that you are able to still get a granular view of the content itself without just generating a generic paragraph summary. Summaries of books will be broken down into chapters, so for instance you can read a 600 page book in about 20 minutes. There will also be quotes directly from the page and link to the direct transcript or file in the frontmatter.

For a book or PDF, drop the file into your vault first (anywhere works, I usually put it in _Attachments/), then call the skill with the filename:

/summarize The Singularity Is Near.epub

The skill finds the file, extracts the text, and writes the summary note into 08 Summaries/.

Vault structure

My vault generally looks like this: (note this is completely separate from my personal vault)

your vault/
├── 01 Updates/
├── 02 Daily/YYYY/MM/   # daily notes, named MM-DD-YY ddd.md
├── 03 Meetings/
├── 04 People/
├── 05 Projects/
├── 06 Research/
├── 07 References/
├── 08 Summaries/
├── _Templates/
├── _Attachments/       # where I put ebooks,pdfs, before telling claude to summarize them 
└── _Bases/             # optional, only if you use Obsidian Bases

If you don’t have these folders, the summarize skill asks you before creating them on first run. You can also rename them in the Configuration block at the top of summarize/SKILL.md.

If you run Claude Code from outside your vault, set VAULT_ROOT:

export VAULT_ROOT="/path/to/vault"

Otherwise the skill walks up from your current directory looking for .obsidian/.

Requirements

The summarize skill uses yt-dlp, defuddle, pdftotext, and pandoc. It’ll check what’s missing on first run and ask before installing.

License

MIT.