Obsidian Vault Architect

This skill exists because there's no one right Obsidian structure — and most online templates collapse the moment someone real tries to use them. A vault for a writer needs an idea-incubation pipeline. A developer's vault needs code snippets, architecture decision records, and debugging journals. A founder's vault needs decision logs and people notes. A student needs literature notes and concept maps. Generic templates fail because they're built for nobody.

The skill's first move is a non-negotiable three-question interview: what do you actually do with knowledge, how much structure can you sustain, and how often do you capture. The answers determine whether you get folder-heavy PARA, link-heavy Zettelkasten, an MOC-driven hybrid, or something simpler. If you skip the interview, the skill refuses to generate — because "build me a vault" without context is exactly how the 3-month-death pattern starts.

What you get back is a complete architecture: folder hierarchy (always under 6 top-level folders — more than that and it rots), tag taxonomy (8 tags max, with explicit rules for each), a template set (atomic note, MOC, project, weekly review) pre-built and ready to paste in, linking conventions (when to backlink, when to create an MOC, when to merge notes), and a 20-minute weekly review checklist that's the actual maintenance routine.

The skill also gives you the failure modes to avoid — the three habits that kill more vaults than anything else: capturing without ever processing (Inbox bloat), starting new MOCs every week (graph fragmentation), and tagging everything (tag soup). Naming the failure modes is part of the deliverable, because the skill that builds the structure has to be the skill that warns you off the moves that destroy it.