10. MOC Maintainer

TL;DR — Once a week, Claude rebuilds index notes (Maps of Content) for each top-level vault folder — 00-Inbox.md, 20-Projects.md, 60-People.md, etc. Each MOC lists children, recent activity, and orphan notes that need linking. Your vault stays navigable as it scales.

When to use it

Weekly, as part of your Sunday ritual (right after weekly-review)
After importing a big chunk of notes (e.g., post-conference dump)
When the graph view starts to look like spaghetti
When you can’t remember whether you have a note on X

What each MOC looks like:

# 20-Projects MOC

> Last rebuilt: 2026-05-15

## Active projects (12)
- [[whittech-redesign]] — updated 2 days ago
- [[obsidian-academy]] — created today
- [[sales-workspace]] — updated 5 days ago
- ...

## Recently completed
- [[seven-oh-tracker]] — archived 2026-05-10

## Orphan notes (no incoming links)
- [[project-XYZ]] — created 30 days ago, never linked. Archive or link?

## Stale (no edits in 30+ days)
- [[old-project-A]]
- [[old-project-B]]

Under the hood (design)

Skill location (planned): ~/.claude/skills/rebuild-mocs/SKILL.md
Reads: every top-level folder via obsidian_list_files_in_dir; recent changes via obsidian_get_recent_changes; backlink data (via Dataview if available, fallback to text search)
Writes: one MOC per top-level folder — 00-Inbox.md, 10-Daily.md, 20-Projects.md, …, 90-Templates.md
Doesn’t touch: the contents of the folders themselves, only the index notes at root

Watch out for (anticipated)

First run will create the MOCs from scratch. Subsequent runs overwrite them — make sure you don’t manually edit MOCs without them being regenerated.
Orphan signal — sometimes orphan notes are intentional (e.g., a one-off draft you’ll publish soon). The skill flags them; don’t auto-delete.
Dataview dependency — for richer queries (e.g., “all projects with status: active”), Dataview plugin needed. The skill should degrade gracefully without it.

Make it yours (planned customizations)

MOC styles — visual MOCs (Obsidian Canvas), textual (Dataview tables), simple (bulleted list). Pick per folder.
Stale thresholds — for 60-People/, “stale” might be 6 months (some friendships are quiet); for 20-Projects/, 30 days is reasonable.
Auto-archive — if a project hasn’t been touched in 90+ days AND is marked status: complete, auto-move to 50-Archive/.

Weekly Review Run weekly-review first, then this. Patterns appear.

Research Synthesizer MOCs are static; synthesis is generative. Both have a place.