Academic researchers who live inside Obsidian now have a reason to pay attention. KatmerCode is a new open-source plugin that embeds Claude Code directly into Obsidian's sidebar as a chat interface, built on Anthropic's Agent SDK.
The plugin ships with seven slash-command skills purpose-built for research workflows. /peer-review runs an eight-criteria manuscript evaluation and generates a radar chart visualization of the results. /cite-verify cross-checks your references against CrossRef, Semantic Scholar, and OpenAlex - three of the largest academic databases - to flag broken citations, retracted papers, or misattributed sources.
The developer built it originally for his wife, an academic researcher, which explains the laser focus on actual research pain points rather than generic AI chat features. Citation checking alone is the kind of tedious work that eats hours during manuscript preparation, and having it run inside the same tool where you're already writing notes is a practical improvement over switching between browser tabs and reference managers.
KatmerCode is free and open-source. The main cost is your own Claude API usage, since it connects through the Agent SDK rather than bundling its own AI backend. For researchers already paying for Claude, this adds a specialized interface without another subscription.