Skills for building and maintaining a persistent, LLM-maintained knowledge wiki (the LLM Wiki pattern), grouped under skills/llm-wiki/ in the repository.
- Wiki Ingest — read sources fully and compile them into wiki pages with provenance
- Wiki Lint — periodic health-check: contradictions, orphans, stale claims, index drift
- Wiki Query — answer questions from wiki pages with citations
The core idea
The LLM Wiki pattern comes from a gist that Andrej Karpathy wrote in April 2026. It shows how to build a personal knowledge base with an LLM.
Most LLM knowledge tools use retrieval. You upload your sources, and the tool re-reads them each time you ask a question. The knowledge does not persist between questions.
The wiki pattern takes a different path. The LLM writes and maintains a set of linked markdown pages. These pages sit between you and the raw sources. When the LLM ingests a source, it writes a summary, adds cross-references, and flags contradictions. This work happens once, not at every question. Karpathy calls the result “a persistent, compounding artifact”: the wiki grows with every source you add.
The roles are clear. You supply the sources and ask the questions. The LLM does the maintenance: summaries, entity and concept pages, index updates, and log entries. This bookkeeping is the work that kills human-maintained wikis. LLMs do not get bored, and one ingest pass can touch 10 to 15 pages.
The pattern has three layers:
- Raw sources — files that do not change. They are the source of truth.
- The wiki — markdown pages that the LLM owns and maintains.
- The schema — a config file (
CLAUDE.mdorAGENTS.md) that sets the rules and workflows.
It has three operations: ingest a new source, query the wiki, and lint it for contradictions, orphans, and stale claims. Good query answers go back into the wiki. The three skills in this section implement these operations.
Karpathy pairs the agent with Obsidian: “Obsidian is the IDE; the LLM is the programmer; the wiki is the codebase.” The idea goes back to Vannevar Bush’s 1945 Memex. Bush did not answer who maintains the collected memory. LLMs now fill that role.