Compass: an Obsidian vault template for a personal operating system

A vault, not an application

The thing Compass actually is, is an Obsidian vault. The repository root is the vault folder, it is opened in Obsidian like any other, and everything in it is plain Markdown with properties, which is the point of the design rather than a limitation of it. On top of that foundation sit the pieces that turn notes into a system: daily notes with a fixed set of questions, quarterly retreat notes, planning notes, habit properties on the daily note, reading material, a task list, writing boards, and a Dataview driven dashboard that ties them together. A first-party Life OS application is being added above those workflows, with an assistant that reads a rules file and runs a library of prompts that ask for approval before acting. The template is described as an independent implementation of the system a video by Mike Schmitz describes, and the README is careful to say it is not affiliated with that work and contains none of its files.

Opening the vault for the first time

The quick start is five steps, and two of them exist because Obsidian protects users from exactly this kind of folder. You download the zip from the releases or clone the repository, you open the folder as a vault in Obsidian, and then you turn off restricted mode, which is the setting that stops Obsidian from running community plugin code. After that you run the command to reload the app without saving, and the ten community plugins and the Life OS plugin come to life. The fifth step is to open the setup note in the dashboards folder, which checks itself and tells you what is left to do. The everyday rhythm is two shortcuts: one opens today's note and the other asks the questions, and the instruction for the first night is to answer ten questions and write one line under the journal heading, because the rest of the system waits thirty days.

The folder map and the single configuration note

The vault is laid out in numbered folders, and the numbering is the documentation:

00 Dashboards/   Setup, Compass Dashboard, Habit Canvas, Daily Questions
01 Journal/      Daily, Weekly, Quarterly periodic notes
02 Retreats/     YYYY-QN Personal Retreat notes
08 Tasks/        Tasks.md, the master list you capture to and never read

Zero holds the dashboards and the setup note, one the daily, weekly and quarterly journal notes, two the retreat notes, three the planning layer with life themes, core values and an ideal week, four the projects, five the people, six the writing boards, seven the library with book notes, eight the master task list, nine the reading material. Alongside them sit the prompts, the templates, the guide and the scripts. The design decision that makes the whole thing maintainable is that one note holds the configuration, listing the questions, the habits, the wheel areas, the folders, the prefixes and the birthdate. The dashboards then find everything by property prefix, so the daily question properties, the habit properties and the wheel properties are discovered by their names, and changing a list in that one file changes the behaviour of the whole vault.

Seven workflows, layered one at a time

The README names seven workflows and, more usefully, says where each one lives and which guide page explains it. Journaling with daily questions, the quarterly personal retreat, multi-scale planning across daily, weekly and quarterly notes, habit tracking through properties on the daily note, daily reading, task management spread across the master list, the projects and the people folders, and writing with Kanban boards for newsletters, video scripts, articles and course material. Then comes the instruction that matters most for anyone who has been disappointed by a system before: pick one workflow, probably the daily journaling, get it working for thirty days, and only then layer the next one on top. The setup note is said to enforce that order, which is a piece of product design that most templates omit, because a vault with seven dashboards and no habit behind it produces exactly the guilt it was meant to remove.

The plugins that come with the vault

Ten community plugins are bundled inside the vault folder, each with a recorded version and its licence, and they are listed as enabled, with the Dataview plugin at version 0.5.68 under the MIT licence and Templater among the others. Alongside them sits the first-party Life OS plugin, which is the piece that provides the assistant and the approval-aware prompt library. Two details are worth noting. Byte-for-byte provenance of the bundled plugins is treated as a separate release check, which is the right way to handle redistributing other people's code inside your own template. And the plugins only run once restricted mode is off and the app is reloaded, which is also the point at which a reader who was not expecting to install third-party code finds out what a template with plugins actually is.

The agent layer, and how it is kept safe

The vault is written to be worked on by an AI agent, and the arrangement is unusually explicit about it. An AGENTS.md file at the root holds the rules and the folder map for any agent, and the per-vendor files for Claude and Gemini simply point at it, so there is one set of rules rather than three. A settings file for Claude gives it a read-only allowlist of tools, and the README notes that it holds no secrets. An example MCP configuration shows how to point an agent at the Local REST API that Obsidian exposes, which is how a tool call reaches the vault at all. The prompts folder holds sixteen prompt notes, one per recurring job, and the guide pages describe the MCP bridge, the knowledge layer and the prompt library. The knowledge layer, which is the wiki and inbox folders, is marked optional and the README says it still works as plain Markdown without the plugin.

Where the project is not finished

The status paragraph in the README is the most important paragraph in it, and it is unusually blunt. The project is a development candidate rather than a newly accepted public release, the existing 1.0.2 archives predate the Life OS application entirely, and the next template candidate of 1.1.0 is subject to packaging and native acceptance. It requires Obsidian 1.13.1 or newer, the mobile compatibility of the core dashboard still needs native testing, and both the agent client and the local API bridge are desktop only, so a workflow that relies on them does not travel to a phone. The releases themselves are telling the same story, with 1.0.0, 1.0.1 and 1.0.2 all published on the same day in August 2026, and the last push to the branch on 2026-09-13. In short, the workflows are the stable part and the application layer is the experiment.

Licence, credits and the seed data

The project is released under the MIT licence, and because it bundles other people's plugins it also ships a licence guide, a third party notices file and a credits document, which is the arrangement that makes redistribution of a template like this defensible. The credits file is where the independence statement is recorded, listing what the project is not derived from. There is also a security policy, a contributing guide and a code of conduct in the tree, and a continuous integration workflow in the GitHub folder whose job is verification. One last practical point that catches new users out, the vault ships with notes tagged as examples, which are seed data so the dashboards have something to render on the first open, and the setup checklist reminds you to delete them. Leaving them in place is how a new vault ends up full of a stranger's answers.

Editorial conclusion

Compass fits a person who already lives in Obsidian and wants a structured system rather than a collection of notes, and it fits a team that wants a second brain with a defined shape rather than a blank vault. It does not fit somebody who wants a finished application, because the product is the vault and the applications are still candidates, and it does not fit a mobile-first reader, since the agent client and the local API bridge are desktop only. Before you rely on it, read the status paragraph in the README, because the published archives predate the Life OS application, and check the licence guide and the third party notices, since the bundled plugins carry their own terms.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. AgriciDaniel/compass on GitHub
2. License: MIT
3. Project website
4. README
5. Releases