Agents

The same comments, from outside Obsidian. A model reviews a note and its remarks appear in the sidebar of the note you already have open.

The other direction works too: you leave comments asking for things, a model reads them, makes the edits, and resolves them.

The anchor contract

An agent never supplies a line or a column. It supplies the quote, and the tool does the arithmetic.

Models cannot count lines, and produce a plausible number under any prompt that asks for one. A wrong number writes a valid anchor whose hint points somewhere else, and the comment attaches to the wrong twin as soon as the quote is ambiguous.

What a write does with the quote:

• found once → compute the range from the match, write the comment.
• found several → refuse, unless a near-line was given, in which case take the nearest occurrence.
• not found → refuse, with the rule that the quote must be verbatim.

The third case is the common one: a model asked to quote a passage paraphrases it, normalizes its whitespace, or straightens its quotation marks. The refusal keeps a bad anchor out of the note.

Matching is strict. A looser search runs only after a failure, and only to report: it quotes the note’s own wording back, to be copied. See Refusals.

Attribution

An agent’s comment carries an origin with the model that wrote it and a run id shared by every comment in that pass.

A review pass arrives all at once, and the shared run id is what makes it one thing to act on: one chip to filter by, and one × to dismiss it with, with an undo behind it.

Writing while Obsidian is open

An external write re-reads the file and proceeds only if it is byte-for-byte what it was. Otherwise it refuses, and the write has to be run again.

The write itself splices a new frontmatter block in front of unchanged body text, so a note Obsidian has open keeps its editor state and every one of its anchors.