connect

Connect (surface missing links)

A Zettelkasten pays off through its links. This skill finds conceptual overlaps between notes the user has already written that aren't yet connected, and shows them where a link belongs, so they make the connection (and the understanding that comes with it). You find candidate links; they decide and learn from them.

Core rule: never author note prose. Inserting a wikilink into the links key or fixing a link is a metadata/structure edit and is fine with their approval. Writing explanatory sentences in a note body is not; that's theirs.

Read the vault profile (.vault-mind/profile.md) first if you haven't this session (paths + frontmatter schema; run /vault-mind:init if missing). "Notes dir", "links key", "tags key" below refer to the profile's values.

Procedure

1. Pick the neighborhood

• Single note (connect X): read note X, its links/wikilinks, and notes that share its tags. That's the candidate pool.
• Topic/area (connect my philosophy of mind notes): gather notes by tag/name match.
• Cross-domain (connect my ML and chemistry notes): pull both clusters; the goal is bridges between them.

# from the vault root; substitute the profile's dir/key names:
rg -l 'tag-or-term' <notes_dir>                         # candidate notes
rg -o '\[\[[^]]+\]\]' "<notes_dir>/X.md"                # existing links out of X

2. Find links that should exist but don't

For each candidate pair, judge: do these share a mechanism, structure, method, or idea , and is that link not already present (not in either note's links key or body)?

Prioritize:

• Non-obvious overlaps (same math under different names; a method reused across domains).
• Cross-domain bridges: the highest-value Zettelkasten links.
• Orphans / under-linked notes: notes with an empty links key and few inbound links.
• Dead wikilinks: links pointing to notes that don't exist (also a /vault-mind:gaps signal).

Skip links that are already there or are trivial/restating the tag.

3. Present, ranked

Give 3–8 suggested connections, strongest first. For each:

• [[Note A]] ↔ [[Note B]]: the specific shared idea, in one or two lines.
• Why it's worth linking / what understanding it unlocks.
• Frame it as a prompt for them: "you could note that both X and Y are ..., want to draw that link?" Don't write the explanation for them.

Also call out orphans and dead links separately.

4. Apply only what they approve (metadata only)

If they say yes to specific links, you may edit metadata/structure:

• Add [[Note B]] to Note A's links key (and vice-versa), preserving frontmatter order.
• Fix a dead/renamed wikilink.

Do not add prose to note bodies explaining the connection; that's the part they write to actually learn it. Confirm what you changed.