Obsidian Official CLI — Evaluation
Section titled “Obsidian Official CLI — Evaluation”Trigger: Talbot’s standing CLI>MCP preference — asked whether Obsidian’s new official CLI should be adopted for KB-OS/ai-config work.
Findings
Section titled “Findings”- Obsidian shipped an official CLI in v1.12 (Feb 2026, GA v1.12.4) — ~115 commands covering files, daily notes, search, tasks/tags/properties, plugins, workspace, dev/eval.
- Not headless. Requires the Obsidian desktop app running (first call auto-launches it). Commands run sequentially (~1s each). Exit code is always 0 — errors must be parsed from stdout, not exit status.
- No Obsidian MCP server exists anywhere in this stack to replace (checked
Core/,ai-config/,.claude/) — the CLI>MCP preference doesn’t even apply here; the real alternative is direct filesystem Read/Edit/Write, which Claude Code already uses.
Verdict
Section titled “Verdict”Not adopted for routine agent vault edits — would be a downgrade (adds a GUI dependency + per-command latency) versus the direct file access already in use, which is faster, git-trackable, and works with Obsidian closed.
Narrow future use identified, not built: live-app-only actions — triggering a Templater/QuickAdd template, forcing a Dataview/Bases re-index, workspace/tab layout control, plugin toggle. Revisit only if a concrete need for one of these shows up.
Full reasoning documented at the SSOT: KB-OS-Context.md → “Deliberately NOT built (and why)”.