daily

Daily Skill

Status

IMPLEMENTED 2026-04-13.

Purpose

Bootstraps today's daily note in the Meta-Vault so the user can start capturing thoughts, scratch work, and "done today" items without yak-shaving YAML frontmatter each morning. The daily note is the anchor of the PKM workflow: it is where the inbox flow starts, where daily momentum is tracked, and where evening reflections land. Every daily note carries the same frontmatter shape (validated by vaultFrontmatterSchema), which makes Dataview queries and the vault-sync validator trivial.

Prerequisites

• Must be invoked from inside a Meta-Vault root (cwd contains 03-daily/) OR with VAULT_DIR resolved to the vault path (see Resolution Order below).
• 03-daily/ must already exist — the skill fails fast if it does not.
• bash + sed + date (always available on macOS/Linux).

VAULT_DIR Resolution Order

1. vault-integration.vault-dir in Session Config (highest precedence)
2. VAULT_DIR environment variable
3. $PWD (fallback when neither is set)

Claude must read Session Config and export VAULT_DIR before calling generate.sh. The canonical pattern (mirrors session-end and evolve):

CONFIG=$(cat .orchestrator/session-config.yaml | yq -o json)
VM_DIR=$(echo "$CONFIG" | jq -r '."vault-integration"."vault-dir" // empty')
: "${VM_DIR:=$VAULT_DIR}"
VAULT_DIR="$VM_DIR" bash /path/to/skills/daily/generate.sh

generate.sh itself reads only VAULT_DIR (pure bash, no Config parser).

Algorithm

1. Resolve VAULT_DIR. Check vault-integration.vault-dir in Session Config first; fall back to the VAULT_DIR env var; then $PWD. The config field takes precedence — see Prerequisites for the canonical resolution snippet. generate.sh then validates: template exists (exit 2 if not), vault dir exists (exit 3 if not), 03-daily/ exists (exit 4 if not).
2. Compute today's date. date +%Y-%m-%d — ISO 8601 date-only, respecting the system timezone (the user is in Vienna, so Europe/Vienna via system TZ).
3. Target path. $VAULT_DIR/03-daily/YYYY-MM-DD.md.
4. Idempotency check. If the target already exists, print Daily note already exists: <path> and exit 0. Never overwrite.
5. Render template. Read templates/daily.md.tpl (next to this SKILL.md) and substitute {{date}}, {{id}}, {{created}}, {{updated}}, {{title}}, {{weekday}} via sed. The template is literal markdown; the only shell interpolation happens in the sed substitutions.
6. Write to target path. Uses sed … > "$TARGET.tmp" && mv "$TARGET.tmp" "$TARGET" to avoid leaving a half-written file on disk if sed fails.
7. Validate (recommended but not automatic in generate.sh). Callers should run the vault-sync validator over the vault in hard mode to confirm schema compliance:

   VAULT_DIR="$VAULT_DIR" bash ../vault-sync/validator.sh --mode hard
   

   The BATS test suite runs this check on every run — see tests/daily.bats. If validation ever fails, the template has drifted from the canonical Zod schema; fix the template, do not downgrade the gate.
8. Print success. Created daily note: <path> on stdout, exit 0.

Implementation

The deterministic path is implemented in generate.sh (pure bash). An LLM-driven fallback is unnecessary: daily-note creation is a 100% mechanical transform and a shell script is faster, cheaper, and more reliable than an LLM round-trip. Recommended invocation:

# Resolve vault dir from Session Config first, env var as fallback:
CONFIG=$(cat .orchestrator/session-config.yaml | yq -o json)
VM_DIR=$(echo "$CONFIG" | jq -r '."vault-integration"."vault-dir" // empty')
: "${VM_DIR:=$VAULT_DIR}"
VAULT_DIR="$VM_DIR" bash ~/Projects/session-orchestrator/skills/daily/generate.sh

Or, if VAULT_DIR is already set in the environment and Session Config has no vault-integration.vault-dir override:

VAULT_DIR=~/Projects/vault bash ~/Projects/session-orchestrator/skills/daily/generate.sh

Or, if the user's cwd is already the vault:

cd ~/Projects/vault && bash ~/Projects/session-orchestrator/skills/daily/generate.sh

Template Placeholders

Placeholder	Example	Format
{{date}}	2026-04-13	ISO 8601 date (YYYY-MM-DD), also used inside the id
{{created}}	2026-04-13	ISO 8601 date (YYYY-MM-DD) — matches isoDateRegex
{{updated}}	2026-04-13	ISO 8601 date (YYYY-MM-DD) — matches isoDateRegex
{{title}}	Daily 2026-04-13	Human-readable heading, Daily YYYY-MM-DD
{{weekday}}	Montag	Full German weekday name (lookup table keyed on date +%u)

Note: {{id}} is not a separate placeholder — the template inlines id: daily-{{date}} so there is only one date substitution. This keeps template rendering to a single sed pass and prevents drift between id and filename.

The German weekday is computed via a hardcoded lookup (1=Montag, 2=Dienstag, ..., 7=Sonntag) rather than LC_TIME=de_DE.UTF-8 date +%A because not every macOS install has the de_DE.UTF-8 locale compiled.

Integration with vault-sync

The template must stay in sync with vaultFrontmatterSchema. The canonical schema lives at:

~/Projects/projects-baseline/packages/zod-schemas/src/vault-frontmatter.ts

Required fields produced by the template: id, type, created, updated. Optional-but-useful fields: title, tags, status. The type is hardcoded to daily (one of the valid values in vaultNoteTypeSchema). The id is daily-YYYY-MM-DD which is kebab-case and 16 chars — passes slugRegex.min(2).max(128).

The BATS suite runs the vault-sync validator end-to-end (bats tests/daily.bats → test 8), so any drift between the template and the schema breaks the build of this skill, not of the vault that consumes it.

Idempotency Guarantee

Running generate.sh twice on the same day is a no-op when the existing file is valid:

1. The first run creates $VAULT_DIR/03-daily/YYYY-MM-DD.md.
2. The second run finds the file, confirms it is non-empty and starts with ---\n (valid YAML frontmatter opener), prints Daily note already exists: <path>, and exits 0.

If the existing file is 0 bytes or lacks the ---\n opener (e.g. a previous run crashed between the $TARGET.tmp write and the mv), the corrupt file is removed and the note is re-created cleanly.

The file is never re-rendered when intact. This matters because the user edits the daily note throughout the day (ticking checkboxes, filling in the Scratch section, etc.) and re-invoking /daily from anywhere — a later session, a different tool, a keybind — must not destroy that work.

Verified by tests/daily.bats test 5: hash-compares the file before and after a second generate.sh invocation.

Anti-Patterns

• DO NOT overwrite existing daily notes. Re-running /daily is routine; losing the day's scratch notes is catastrophic. The idempotency check is load-bearing.
• DO NOT hardcode the vault path. VAULT_DIR is the contract. Hardcoding ~/Projects/vault breaks tests, breaks any future multi-vault setup, and couples this skill to one user's machine.
• DO NOT skip the post-write validation step. If the BATS suite stops running the vault-sync validator, template drift will quietly ship invalid frontmatter into the vault and only be caught at the next session-end gate.
• DO NOT use LC_TIME for the weekday. The locale is not guaranteed to exist. Use the hardcoded lookup table.
• DO NOT add sed-unsafe characters to the template. The placeholders use | as the sed delimiter; if you add a | to any substituted value, sed will break. Keep substitutions plain.

Exit codes

Code	Meaning
0	Success (created) or idempotent skip (already exists and valid)
1	Unexpected runtime failure (set -e caught an unhandled error)
2	Infra error: template file not found at $SCRIPT_DIR/templates/daily.md.tpl
3	Config error: VAULT_DIR does not exist as a directory
4	Vault structure error: $VAULT_DIR/03-daily/ directory is missing

Files

• SKILL.md — this file.
• generate.sh — the POSIX bash implementation of the algorithm above.
• templates/daily.md.tpl — the daily-note template with {{placeholder}} markers.
• tests/daily.bats — 8 BATS test cases covering creation, substitution, idempotency, missing-dir errors, and end-to-end schema validation via vault-sync.

Testing

From the skill directory:

bats tests/daily.bats

Expected: 8/8 passing. Test 8 runs the vault-sync validator over a fixture vault that contains only the freshly-generated daily note, proving end-to-end schema compliance.