Building an Agenda Box plugin for Obsidian

I’ve been using Obsidian as my note-taking app for a couple of years now. I’ve got over 5,000 notes for various things. Including lots of meetings. There are times when my job is basically going to meetings. And I need to be able to keep track of what we intend to talk about in each meeting (especially as they start to blur together).

Graph of over 5,000 notes in Obsidian. The red dots are mostly meetings. Blue are people, Orange-ish are Topics. Green are vendors.

The meeting agenda is how we do that. I don’t mean in a Robert’s Rules kind of rigid structure. What topics are we intending to discuss? Who is leading each part of the discussion? Am I staying on track? Is there enough time to get to the rest of the stuff we need to discuss? And, each meeting is different, with different patterns, different expectations, different roles. So the agendas are an important way to help guide those discussions and to keep on track.

For the 2 years that I’ve been using Obsidian for this, I’ve been thinking “it’d sure be super handy to have a little floaty box with the # Agenda section of a note so I could refer to it (or even edit it!) without having to lose my place in my notes of the discussion.” And basically came up with workarounds to try to use the Table of Contents sidebar to kind of do it, or to just give up and scroll and try to not lose my train of thought while tracking 2 separate edits in the same document.

And then there’s Claude. (boo. whatever.) During a meeting a week or so ago, I thought “hey - I wonder if Claude has any Obsidian documentations in its opaque LLM, and if so, could it get me started?”

So I fired up Claude - again, during a meeting - and had a first working version done before the half-way point of the meeting. With no prior knowledge for how to create a plugin, or even if this specific kind of thing was even technically possible. Turns out, yup. Possible. And now I have my own little custom “Agenda Box” plugin for Obsidian.

Anyway. The demo:

*(the YuJa editor was too fiddly to bother editing out that first bit. 🎉)*

I’m not planning to publish the plugin to the Obsidian plugin directory. It’s AI Slop, and the Obsidian plugin reviewers don’t need this on top of the already-exploding burden of reviewing the increase in plugins generated by AI tools.

But. It works, and I intend to keep using it.