Yesterday a post dropped on r/PromptEngineering that flips the whole Claude+Obsidian playbook.
Not another persistent memory layer for your codebase. The opposite. u/Routine_Round_8491, a PhD student in AI, built 8 specialized agents to help Claude manage the human stuff: inbox triage, meeting notes, deadlines, knowledge retrieval. The things that collapse when you’re overwhelmed, not when your repo lacks context.
The twist is the architecture. And it’s cleaner than you’d expect from someone who describes their prompt engineering experience as “fresh.”
How the dispatcher pattern works
- 🗂️ The router: A CLAUDE.md file reads user intent and routes to the right agent. No mega-agent trying to do everything at once.
- 📝 The agents: 8 specialized .md files, each with YAML frontmatter and a focused system prompt. One job per agent, no overlap.
- 🔗 The chain: The dispatcher chains agents sequentially (max depth 3). Agents don’t talk to each other directly. No circular calls, no confabulation chains.
- 📁 Shared context: A references/ folder with vault structure and naming conventions. Every agent pulls from it without redundancy.
Pro tip
The no-agent-to-agent rule is the most underrated part of this build. When agents pass context directly, errors compound and debugging turns into archaeology. A single dispatcher that chains sequentially keeps the whole thing predictable. Controller pattern, not peer-to-peer mesh.
Bonus tip: Don’t start with 8 agents. Start with a dispatcher and 2 specialists. Run it for a week. Add more only when the simple version actually breaks.
The builder is asking for prompt architecture feedback on r/PromptEngineering. If you’ve built multi-agent setups before, they’d genuinely benefit from your teardown.
🔧 Want to steal the pattern? CLAUDE.md as dispatcher, one inbox agent, one notes agent. That’s your v1. Ship it before you design v8.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: How do you prevent agents from making wrong decisions with important stuff like email or deadlines?
A: Two things: add an explicit confirmation step for any agent touching email or deadlines (you always review before it ships), and have each agent log what it did, why, and its confidence level. This creates an audit trail so you can spot mistakes early and improve the prompts.
Q: Why does the “no inter-agent communication” rule actually work?
A: Agents talking to each other can create confabulation chains where one agent’s hallucination becomes another agent’s fact. By routing through a dispatcher sequentially, you keep things clean and catch issues at each step. Less fancy than agents collaborating, but way more reliable for real-world tasks.
Q: Isn’t 8 agents for inbox and notes overkill?
A: Only if they’re not doing specific things. If each agent has a narrow job (transcription, triage, knowledge retrieval), specialization makes them better. That said, most people should probably start with 2-3 agents and add more based on what actually breaks, rather than building the full system upfront.
Everyone’s using Claude+Obsidian to understand codebases. I’m using it to remind me I’ve been eating like garbage for two weeks straight: 8-agent Obsidian crew, roast my prompts.
by u/Routine_Round_8491 in PromptEngineering