baljanak

LLM Wiki: Adding a Learning Filter

Karpathy's LLM Wiki nailed something. LLMs are perfect for the bookkeeping that kills knowledge bases. Updating cross-references, flagging contradictions, keeping pages consistent - that's what they're good at. Humans curate, LLMs maintain. The wiki compounds because maintenance cost drops to zero.

I've been running a version of this for months. One thing kept breaking.

What happens at month 6

LLM Wiki has three layers: raw sources (immutable), the wiki (LLM-maintained), and a schema (configuration). The schema tells the LLM how to structure the wiki.

rohitg00

LLM Wiki v2

A pattern for building personal knowledge bases using LLMs. Extended with lessons from building agentmemory 20K+ Stars ⭐️, a persistent memory engine for AI coding agents.

This builds on Andrej Karpathy's original LLM Wiki idea file. Everything in the original still applies. This document adds what we learned running the pattern in production: what breaks at scale, what's missing, and what separates a wiki that stays useful from one that rots.

What the original gets right

The core insight is correct: stop re-deriving, start compiling. RAG retrieves and forgets. A wiki accumulates and compounds. The three-layer architecture (raw sources, wiki, schema) works. The operations (ingest, query, lint) cover the basics. If you haven't read the original, start there.

karpathy

LLM Wiki

A pattern for building personal knowledge bases using LLMs.

This is an idea file, it is designed to be copy pasted to your own LLM Agent (e.g. OpenAI Codex, Claude Code, OpenCode / Pi, or etc.). Its goal is to communicate the high level idea, but your agent will build out the specifics in collaboration with you.

The core idea

Most people's experience with LLMs and documents looks like RAG: you upload a collection of files, the LLM retrieves relevant chunks at query time, and generates an answer. This works, but the LLM is rediscovering knowledge from scratch on every question. There's no accumulation. Ask a subtle question that requires synthesizing five documents, and the LLM has to find and piece together the relevant fragments every time. Nothing is built up. NotebookLM, ChatGPT file uploads, and most RAG systems work this way.