Weekly Review: a Finished Review Instead of a Blank Page

The Stack

Tested Against

Prerequisites

• Claude Code installed and logged in
• An Obsidian vault you edit through the week
• cron (built into macOS/Linux)

Steps

1. 1

   Check your toolchain

   The mechanical core needs bash, find and date. Claude Code is the agent for the final step.

   for bin in bash find date; do
     command -v "$bin" >/dev/null 2>&1 || { echo "MISSING required: $bin"; exit 1; }
   done
   command -v claude >/dev/null 2>&1 || echo "optional (needed for the review step): claude"
   echo "preflight OK on $(uname -s)"

2. 2

   Find this week's notes (the deterministic core)

   This is the exact command the review runs: list every markdown note modified in the last 7 days. We seed a recent note and prove find picks it up.

   mkdir -p vault/Notes vault/Reviews
   printf 'x\n' > vault/Notes/weekly-target.md
   find vault -name '*.md' -mtime -7 | sed 's#.*/##' | sort -u

3. 3

   Write the scheduled script

   The exact weekly-review.sh from the guide, made executable, carrying the find command and the claude -p call.

   mkdir -p bin
   cat > bin/weekly-review.sh <<'EOF'
   #!/usr/bin/env bash
   cd ~/Documents/MyVault
   claude -p "Find every note modified in the last 7 days (run: find . -name '*.md' -mtime -7). Create Reviews/$(date +%F)-weekly.md covering: accomplishments, decisions made, tasks completed vs planned, patterns you notice, and suggested priorities for next week."
   EOF
   chmod +x bin/weekly-review.sh
   test -x bin/weekly-review.sh && grep -q 'mtime -7' bin/weekly-review.sh && echo "weekly-review ready"

4. 4

   Check the Friday cron line

   Prove the 5pm-Friday schedule is well-formed.

   echo "0 17 * * 5 /Users/you/bin/weekly-review.sh" | grep -Eq '^0 17 \* \* 5 ' && echo "cron OK: Friday 17:00"

5. 5

   Let it run (the Claude step, not checked by CI)

   Schedule it (`0 17 * * 5 ~/bin/weekly-review.sh`) and Claude Code drafts your review every Friday. Non-deterministic and key-gated, so CI doesn't run it, the badge covers the find command, script and schedule above.