Mordomo

A personal operating system built on an Obsidian vault and a coding agent.

Mordomo is the page I open first every morning — tasks, calendar, a digest of what landed overnight — and the agent that maintains it. The unusual part isn't the dashboard. It's that the same agent that writes my data also writes the dashboard.

The same page, restyled. Today-v2.md runs the same loader, the same four tiles and the same data — a different stylesheet and a different grid:

40 seconds of it working

Recorded at 2× — full-quality MP4. All content comes from the included demo vault (./demo-vault/seed.sh); no real calendar, inbox or tasks appear anywhere in this repo.

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The idea

Agent as the write path. Dataview as the read path.

The agent is the only thing that mutates state. Nothing else writes, so the data contract is guaranteed, so the read layer can stay dumb, fast, and declarative — plain markdown rendered by Dataview. No database, no sync service, no API. Files.

Most Obsidian AI projects stop there. Mordomo has a second write path, and that's the actual thesis:

Plane	What the agent writes	You say	You get
Data	Notes, frontmatter, snapshots	"add a task due Friday"	A new note
Control	Skills, tiles, CSS — the app itself	"add a tile for my week ahead"	A new tile

Using the software and modifying the software are the same action, through the same interface. There is no settings screen, no plugin to fork, no config schema to learn. You ask, and the app is different.

That idea isn't new — Emacs, HyperCard and Smalltalk all tried to collapse the gap between using a tool and reshaping it. All of them hit the same wall: you had to learn Lisp, or HyperTalk, or the object browser first. Natural language removes the wall. Mordomo is what that looks like when the runtime is a folder of markdown files.

Two halves, two names

• Mordomo — Portuguese for the household steward: the one who runs the house, keeps the books, and has what you need ready before you ask. The agent. The write path.
• Azulejo — the Portuguese ceramic tile: individually painted, individually replaceable, composed into panels far larger than any one piece. The dashboard. The read path.

The dashboard is a panel of azulejos. The mordomo paints new ones.

How it works

you ─── terminal (inside Obsidian) ─── Claude Code ───┐
                                                      │ writes
                          ┌───────────────────────────┘
                          ▼
              markdown + frontmatter          ← state
              tiles/ + theme/azulejo.css      ← the interface
                          │
                          │ rendered by Dataview
                          ▼
                     Today.md  ← what you actually look at

The terminal runs inside Obsidian, so the loop is closed on one screen: you ask, the agent edits the vault, Obsidian live-reloads, you see the result.

Modules

Tile	What it shows	Data from
Tasks	Today's work as a three-state board — todo / in progress / done, click to cycle	Today.md frontmatter
Lookups	Things to read or investigate when there's time	Today.md frontmatter
Calendar	Today as a schedule rail with a live "now" line and free-time gaps; the week as busy bars	/calendar → Google Calendar
AI brief	Overnight newsletters, deduped across sources into news + long-form	/mail-brief → Gmail
Finance	Watchlist with sparklines	not built

Command	Does
/good-morning	The whole morning: archives yesterday, carries open loops forward, refreshes both snapshots, prints a brief
/calendar	Snapshots the week ahead
/mail-brief	Compiles today's newsletter digest

External data arrives through MCP connectors and is snapshotted into the vault — dashboards never call an API at render time. Slower to refresh, instant to open, and it works offline.

Two skins, one dashboard

Today.md and Today-v2.md run the same loader, the same four tiles and the same data. The entire difference is frontmatter:

source: Today          # read and write the other note's lists — nothing diverges
cssclasses: [azu-material]

One is dark, dense and Linear-ish in two columns; the other is a light Google Workspace layout with elevated cards and a narrow left rail. Tick a task on either page and both update, because there's one list shown twice.

That's the architecture's strongest claim made checkable: presentation is genuinely separable from data, and a new look costs a stylesheet rather than a fork.

Requirements

• Obsidian with Dataview and a terminal plugin
• Claude Code and an Anthropic subscription
• Desktop only — a DataviewJS dashboard and an embedded terminal don't make sense on a phone

Setup

Full walkthrough in SETUP.md — Obsidian, the two plugins, the connectors, and the three files you edit to make it yours.

The short version:

git clone https://github.com/MarianaCoelho9/Mordomo.git
# open the folder as a vault in Obsidian
# install Dataview + Terminal, enable the `azulejo` CSS snippet
./demo-vault/seed.sh     # see it working before connecting anything

This is a reference, not a product

It's one person's vault, shaped around one person's mornings. The tiles I need are almost certainly not the tiles you need.

Clone it, get it running, then delete what you don't want and ask the agent for what you do — Today.md renders whatever its tiles: list names, so adding a view is a request, not a pull request. A personal operating system someone else designed isn't personal.

Scope

This is a personal tool, built in the open because the architecture is worth sharing — not a product. There's no test suite, no provider abstraction, and no plugin API, on purpose. When something breaks, the recovery story is asking the agent to fix it, and for one user on one machine that's enough.

A module earns its place only if it's something I check or decide on daily.

Credits

The Obsidian format skills (obsidian-cli, obsidian-markdown, obsidian-bases, json-canvas) are vendored from kepano/obsidian-skills under the MIT licence, unmodified. See .claude/skills/ATTRIBUTION.md.

Licence

Apache 2.0