zettel-builder

What zettel-builder does

The skill turns each piece of source material into several atomic cards, one judgment per card, and requires a values restatement at the end of every card: agree, disagree or partly agree, plus a boundary. Embeddings are used only for semantic recall. The agent must read the full text to decide whether two cards are truly linked or duplicates, with no automatic skipping on a similarity threshold. The README is written in Chinese.

It has four modes. Ingest cuts material into cards, scan processes a queue of pending materials, inspect audits the card pool for article-ready clusters, orphan cards and gaps, and write turns a chosen cluster into an outline for the user's own writing skill. Inspection can send a Telegram reminder when a cluster is dense enough. Before first use the user must fill in references/voice-snapshot.md with three to seven core values and style rules. Embeddings default to fastembed with BGE-small-zh-v1.5, cached under ~/.cache/fastembed, with TF-IDF as a fallback.

Key features

• Four modes: ingest, scan, inspect and write
• Atomic cards with a mandatory values restatement
• Agent reads full text to confirm links, with embeddings used only for recall
• Periodic inspection for article-ready clusters, orphan cards and evidence gaps
• Optional Telegram reminders and hand-off of outlines to your own writing skill
• Embeddings through fastembed with a TF-IDF fallback

When to use it

• Turning saved articles and highlights into a linked card network
• Finding out when enough related cards exist to write an article
• Handing a chosen cluster to a writing skill as an outline

Who it is for: Writers and researchers who keep Zettelkasten-style notes and want an agent to build and inspect the card network.

How it fits with Hermes Agent

Supports Hermes Agent among other agents: the README lists Hermes alongside Claude Code, OpenClaw and Codex as harnesses, and says to place the skill in the harness's skill search root.

How to install zettel-builder

These commands are copied from the project's README. Check the repository for the latest steps before you run them.

git clone https://github.com/wshuyi/zettel-builder.git ~/.claude/skills/zettel-builder

Requirements: A filled-in references/voice-snapshot.md; optional writing skill, deep-research skill, source materials and OpenClaw cron scheduling

Note: Cutting long articles into cards uses a lot of tokens, so the README recommends testing a small batch before putting it on a schedule.

FAQ