Codex Vitae - spanko-tech-vault

A personal Obsidian vault built around systems I actually use daily. Pick the systems that fit your workflow - almost everything is independent, nothing requires everything else, but it clicks together very well :)

The standout piece is Oraculum - a fully embedded AI assistant powered by the Gemini API, with 60+ tools, deep research, semantic search, and a settings panel. More on that below.

All dashboard code is built with Datacore (JSX/React inside Obsidian), co-developed with GitHub Copilot. This is not a Dataview vault - Datacore replaces it entirely. An effort went into keeping the code maintainable: shared UI components, a centralized lint rule system, and a reusable utility layer mean individual dashboards stay lean and consistent rather than each reinventing the wheel.

Note: This is a sanitized public fork of my personal vault, with a completely different folder structure. I test before new versions, but issues may slip through (tags, wrong folders, etc.) - if you find one, open an issue.

Systems

System	TLDR	Lint
🔮 Oraculum	Embedded Gemini AI assistant with 60+ tools, deep research, semantic search, and a full settings panel.
🏠 Home	Vault-wide dashboard with KPIs, news feeds, weather, quotes, and a bird's eye view of everything in motion.
🧠 Cogito	A knowledge base for notes, media, and MOCs - promoting ideas from Stub to Draft to Solid to Reference.	✅ Notes (age, backlinks, section quality), Media (stale backlog, progress), MOC index quality
📊 Finances	Track income, expenses, and budgets with multi-currency support.
🍽️ Food	Log daily meals and track calorie and macro targets (kcal, protein, carbs).
🌱 Growth	Growth-oriented hub - skills tree, brag doc, reviews, ADRs, and postmortems.	✅ Brags, ADRs, Reviews, Postmortems (missing sections, incomplete entries)
✅ Habits	Track daily and weekly habits with visual heatmaps and progress statistics.
🖥️ Infrastructure	Keep track of servers, services, and networks.	✅ Cross-entity rules - missing links between servers, services, and networks
🐛 Issues	Kanban issue tracker linked to Projects and Releases with priority and category filtering.
💼 Job Search	Manage job applications through a kanban workflow with document and status tracking.
🧩 Leetcode	Algorithm practice log with automated problem import and per-topic progress tracking.	✅ Missing solution, unsolved problems, incomplete notes
📽️ Presentations	Manage slide decks and talks built with Advanced Slides (Reveal.js).	✅ Missing slide file, stale drafts
🚀 Projects	Lifecycle management for projects from Idea through Active/Paused to Shipped/Archived.	✅ Stale active projects, missing sections, no linked issues
📦 Releases	Plan and document software releases with version tracking, highlights, and changelogs.	✅ Missing highlights, empty changelog, no linked project
📚 Resources	Curated reference library for tools, links, and assets with use-case notes.	✅ Missing URL, empty notes, stale entries

Some Screenshots

Home Dashboard - vault-wide overview with KPIs, finances, habits, news feeds, weather, quote of the day, and LeetCode daily challenge.

Home Dashboard - Mobile - dedicated responsive layout at <700px with tabbed news feeds, quick habit logging, and macro tracking.

Mobile: The Home dashboard has a dedicated mobile layout (responsive at 700px) - news feeds, habit logging, finances, weather, and quotes all work on phone. Most other dashboards are usable on mobile too, though they're designed primarily for desktop width. You will have to horizontally scroll to see most of the lists etc.

Oraculum - chat with your vault. 60+ tools, thinking steps visible, deep research with Google Search grounding. Also looks good on phone, however I did not test it as much.

Research Panel - queue topics during conversation, fire them all at once. Results persist and are searchable.

Cogito - notes and media with lint checks, inline status promotion, and domain schema reminders.

Food & Finances - daily macro tracking with FatSecret import; multi-currency income/expense with ECB live rates.

Why This Exists

There are better dedicated apps for most of these things - Jira does issues better, almost any food tracking app does food tracking better, and so on. I know.

What I wanted was everything in one place, and that place happens to be Obsidian. These are the systems I actually use daily and that made sense to centralize. Some will feel like overkill for what they do, and that's fine - use what fits, skip what doesn't.

The Infrastructure system is especially purpose-made for managing my own network with my specific needs and wants.

Many systems include lint checkers that surface issues - missing sections, stale frontmatter, incomplete entries. They're annoying in the best way.

Oraculum

Oraculum is an AI assistant embedded directly in the vault as a Datacore dashboard. It uses the Gemini API and has access to 60+ tools that can read, create, and update notes across every system - no copy-pasting context into a chat window.

Why Gemini? At the time of writing, Google offers exceptionally generous free-tier rate limits on Gemma 4 (chat), text-embedding-004 (semantic search), and Gemini 2.5 Flash with Search grounding (deep research). The combination of all three being free-tier viable is what made this project worth building. That may change - but for now, it's hard to beat.

Semantic search is powered by text-embedding-004 (768-dimensional embeddings). Trigger indexing from the Oraculum settings panel - once built, it can find conceptually related notes even with zero keyword overlap. Datacore's built-in metadata indexing means the embeddings layer sits on top of already-fast vault queries.

Deep Research is the more powerful mode - it uses Gemini 2.5 Flash with Google Search grounding to research topics across the web, synthesize findings, and save structured results back into the vault. Results are stored per-topic and can be recalled in future conversations without re-running the research. This is best used by chatting with Oraculum for a while, letting it build a queue of topics and then batching that research with one call.

In theory with Datacore and Semantic Indexing the vault should scale very well knowledge wise while still being blazingly fast.

Setup

Oraculum needs a Gemini API key to work. The key is stored in browser localStorage only - never written to disk or committed.

1. Open Systems/Oraculum/Oraculum.md
2. Click the ⚙️ settings icon
3. Paste your Gemini API key and save

Everything else (model, tools, integrations) is configurable from the same settings panel.

Before using Oraculum, fill in the placeholder files in Systems/Oraculum/Context/ and Systems/Oraculum/Skills/25 User Profile.md - that's where you tell it about yourself. The more you put in, the more useful it becomes.

Finances - Currency

The system defaults to CZK as the display currency. To change it, open Systems/Finances/Finances.md and update the baseCurrency frontmatter field to your currency code (e.g. EUR, USD, GBP).

Individual entries can be logged in any of three currencies (your base + EUR + USD). The "⟳ Fetch rates" button auto-updates the exchange rates from ECB via Frankfurter.

Vault Setup

⚠️ Datacore is required. This vault uses Datacore exclusively for all dashboards - not Dataview. Install it first or nothing will render.

Plugins

Required

Plugin	Purpose
Datacore	Powers every dashboard - JSX/React query engine for Obsidian. Nothing renders without this.
Templater	Scripting layer for automated note creation - LeetCode problem scraper, FatSecret ingredient scraper.

Strongly recommended

Plugin	Purpose
Editor Width Slider	Status bar slider to widen notes - the dashboards are significantly more usable at full width.
Folder Notes	Lets folders have their own note, which is how every system dashboard is mounted.
Filename Heading Sync	Keeps H1 headings in sync with filenames - avoids notes drifting out of sync when renamed.

Optional - feature-specific

Plugin	Purpose
Excalidraw	Drawing integration for Cogito notes.
Advanced Slides	Reveal.js presentation builder - powers the Presentations system.

Personal recommendations - not used by the vault code directly, but part of the daily setup:

Plugin	Purpose
Admonition	Styled callout blocks with custom types and icons.
Callout Manager	Manage and customise callout styles in one place.
Custom File Explorer Sorting	Control file and folder order in the sidebar beyond the default alphabetical/modified options.
Iconize	Add icons to files and folders in the file explorer.
Style Settings	Configure theme variables - required if using Anupucin.

Theme: Anupucin by @AnubisNekhet - a Catppuccin-based theme with extensive Style Settings support.

Templater Configuration

After installing Templater, configure two paths under Settings → Templater:

Setting	Value
Template folder location	Toolkit/Templates
Script files folder location	Toolkit/Scripts/Templater

Also enable "Trigger Templater on new file creation" so templates fire automatically.

For the Folder Templates feature, map these folders to their templates so new files created inside them pick up the right template automatically:

Folder	Template
Systems/Leetcode	Toolkit/Templates/Leetcode Problem.md
Systems/Food/Recipes	Toolkit/Templates/Ingredient (FatSecret).md

Integrations

Everything the vault pulls from externally - none of these are required for the core vault to work, but each one powers a specific part of the UI.

Service	Used in	What for	Auth
Gemini API	Oraculum	Chat (Gemma 4), semantic search (text-embedding-004), deep research (Gemini 2.5 Flash + Search grounding)	API key - free tier
Supadata	Oraculum	YouTube video transcript fetching	API key - free tier
GitHub	Oraculum	Search repos, read files, browse issues	Optional PAT
Stack Overflow	Oraculum	Search questions and answers via Stack Exchange	Optional key
Google Books	Oraculum	Book catalog search - metadata, previews, ISBNs	Optional API key
Open Library	Oraculum	Free book search - metadata, ISBNs, editions, borrow/scan availability	Optional contact email
Wikipedia REST API	Home, Oraculum	"On This Day" events widget; article search and summarisation tools	None
Jina Reader	Oraculum, Web scraping	Fallback renderer for JS-heavy/SPA pages that return sparse content on direct fetch	None
Frankfurter	Finances	Live exchange rates from ECB data	None
Open-Meteo	Home	Current weather + 3-day forecast	None
ZenQuotes	Home	Quote of the Day	None
Hacker News (Firebase API)	Home	Tech news feed - top/new/best stories	None
Dev.to API	Home	Dev articles by tag	None
Lobsters	Home	Tech link aggregator - hottest or by tag	None
RSS feeds	Home	Tech News panel (The New Stack, Ars Technica, DevClass, InfoQ by default - configurable)	None
LeetCode GraphQL API	Home, Leetcode	Daily challenge widget + problem metadata scraper	None
FatSecret	Food	Food/ingredient nutritional data scraper	None

Fun fact: Obsidian can handle obsidian:// URI scheme redirects - which means OAuth flows work. We can catch this in Datacore and thus any API that requires OAuth to access private user data (Spotify, Notion, Google Calendar, etc.) is technically integrable. The public vault only uses API keys and public endpoints today, but I started experimenting with some deeper integrations.

System Ideas

If you have an idea for a system that would fit well here, feel free to open an issue on GitHub. No promises, but I do look at them - and if it's something I'd actually use, it'll probably end up here eventually.