Skill: Vault Tend

The standing knowledge-manager team for your vault. Where knowledge-build creates knowledge and the monthly Vault Health Check audits (read-only), this skill acts: it makes careful, sweeping changes across many notes — re-languaging, normalizing, repairing, deduplicating, tidying, archiving, or any adjustment you ask for.

Because it edits at scale, it is preview-first and confirmation-gated, always.

When to activate

• "tidy / clean up the vault", "vault maintenance", "act like a knowledge manager".
• "translate / put the whole vault in French" (re-language).
• "normalize the frontmatter", "fix the broken wikilinks", "deduplicate people/projects".
• "make this adjustment everywhere…" (a custom vault-wide edit).
• After a Vault Health Check, to act on what it flagged.

Do NOT use vault-tend when:

• It's a single-note edit → just edit that note.
• The user wants to create synthesis/knowledge → knowledge-build.
• The user wants to find something → recall.

Non-negotiable safety model

This skill can touch hundreds of notes. Every run follows the same loop:

1. Scope — restate exactly what will change and where (which folders, which note types).
2. Scan & preview — report counts and show 2–3 representative before/after diffs. Change nothing yet.
3. Confirm — get explicit go-ahead. For large scopes, confirm per batch.
4. Apply in batches — small batches, one Git commit per batch, so any step is reversible.
5. Report — what changed, what was skipped, what needs a human decision.

Hard rules (from _CLAUDE.md):

• Never delete a note — propose moving to 07-archive/ instead.
• Append-only zones (02-people/, 05-decisions/): never delete a dated timeline entry or an (auto-logged) / (Backfilled) marker. (The pre-commit hook enforces this.)
• Preamble stays English — the ## For future Claude block is never translated.
• Wikilinks are identities — don't rewrite link paths during a language change; rename only via the dedup/rename operation, and update all backlinks when you do.
• Fuzzy-match before merging duplicates; never merge without confirmation.
• Prefer many small commits over one giant diff.

Operations

Pick the one(s) the user asked for. Each still runs the preview→confirm→apply→report loop.

1. Re-language the vault

Translate note bodies into the target language (from MY-PROFILE.md Working language, or the one the user names — e.g. "tout en français").

• Translate: prose, section content, editable sections (Compiled truth, Open threads, goals, decisions text, knowledge bodies, the bullet prose inside timeline entries).
• Keep verbatim: the ## For future Claude preamble (English), frontmatter values (enums/dates/tags), wikilink paths, quoted verbatim sources, code, and — by default — the dated timeline headers (### YYYY-MM-DD — …) and protected markers.
• Section headings: you may localize standard headings (e.g. ## Links → ## Liens) only if the user wants it; default is to keep canonical English headings so skills still match them. Flag this trade-off in the preview.
• Deep mode (only if the user explicitly asks to also translate historical entry headers): this rewrites append-only history, so the pre-commit hook will flag it — that's the safety net. Do it as a clearly-labeled, separately-committed migration the user has acknowledged.

2. Normalize frontmatter

Ensure each note has the required fields for its type (per _CLAUDE.md schemas): add missing ai-first: true, fix field casing, dedupe/trim tags, fill obvious gaps (updated), flag the rest.

3. Repair wikilinks

Find broken [[...]] (target missing), empty [[ ]], or path drift. Offer to create stubs or fix the path; update backlinks. Report orphans (no inbound link).

4. Deduplicate

Fuzzy-match within 02-people/ and 03-projects/ for near-duplicates (e.g. Alex Rivera vs Alex Rivera (PM)). Propose merges (keep the richer note, append the other's timeline, update all backlinks, archive the loser). Confirm each merge.

5. Tidy formatting & consistency

Align section names/order to the type schema, fix heading levels, remove accidental duplicate sections — without changing meaning. Never touch append-only history content.

6. Archive sweep

Propose moving completed projects, leavers, and notes stale past the MY-PROFILE.md threshold to 07-archive/ (add status: archived). Confirm the list; never auto-archive silently.

7. Custom adjustment

Any vault-wide change the user describes ("add a priority tag to all active projects", "standardize date formats"). Same loop: scope → preview → confirm → batched apply → report.

8. Knowledge garden

A focused maintenance pass on 06-knowledge/. Delegates to knowledge-build curator (Mode C) under the standing preview→confirm→apply loop, with extra reporting:

• Run the curator sweep (Mode C.2): rebuild auto-maintained hub listings, refresh _INDEX.md, detect orphans, near-duplicates, stubs awaiting enrichment, stale wiki pages.
• Propose structural moves: any type: doc still sitting at the root of 06-knowledge/ (legacy from before the _sources/ convention) → move into _sources/ and rewrite the inbound wikilinks. Any vault-meta artifact (kickstart-backfill-*, vault-health-*) in 06-knowledge/ → propose archival.
• Propose new hubs for unhubbed domain clusters with ≥ 3 notes (Mode C.2 step 3).
• Propose merges for near-duplicate wiki/lesson pages.
• Update ## Knowledge domains in MY-PROFILE.md if the user confirms newly proposed domains.
• Report: hubs rebuilt, notes moved, orphans flagged, merges proposed, stubs aging out.

This is the recurring "tidy 06-knowledge" pass. Run it monthly or when _INDEX.md health counters cross thresholds (the brief surfaces them).

Report

✓ vault-tend — operation: re-language → fr
  Scanned: 142 notes. In scope: 96 (excluded 46: already fr / archive / preamble-only).
  Applied in 5 batches (5 commits). Skipped 3 (flagged below).
  Preserved: 38 dated timeline headers, all (auto-logged)/(Backfilled) markers, all preambles (EN).
  ⚠️ Needs you: 2 person notes have conflicting duplicates — review proposed merges.
  ⚠️ Heads-up: canonical headings kept in English so skills keep matching; say the word to localize.

Anti-patterns to avoid

❌ Applying without a preview — always show the diff and counts first. ❌ One massive commit — batch it so it's reversible. ❌ Translating the preamble or frontmatter enums — those stay as-is. ❌ Rewriting append-only history unless the user explicitly opts into deep mode. ❌ Deleting notes — archive instead. ❌ Silent merges — confirm every dedup. ❌ Rewriting wikilink paths during a language pass — paths are identities.

Special cases

Mixed-language vault (the common one)

"Put everything in French": detect each note's language, translate only the non-fr ones, keep already-French notes untouched, and update MY-PROFILE.md Working language to fr so new notes follow suit. Preview the count of EN→FR notes before starting.

Very large vault

Work folder by folder, oldest-first, committing per folder. Offer to stop after each so the user can sanity-check before continuing. In Claude Code, fan out parallel subagents for the read-only scan/preview phase (one per folder) — modern models handle this well and it cuts the sweep time; keep the apply phase sequential and batch-committed.

Running from a health report

If a 06-knowledge/vault-health-*.md exists, offer to action its findings (orphans, stubs, stale people, duplicates) one category at a time.