LLM Wiki on IWE: Karpathy's pattern with deterministic lint, link-safe refactoring and an IDE that edits in place

llm-wiki-iwe.md

LLM Wiki on IWE

A fork of Karpathy's LLM Wiki idea file. The original describes the pattern; this is one concrete way to run it, on IWE (open source, Apache-2.0: a CLI, an MCP server and an LSP for markdown folders). Disclosure: I wrote IWE.

Same idea as the original: paste it into your agent (Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, etc.) and build the specifics together.

What stays and what changes

The original sets it up as "Obsidian is the IDE; the LLM is the programmer; the wiki is the codebase." All of that stays: raw sources, an LLM-owned wiki, a schema file, ingest / query / lint.

What changes is the bookkeeping. In the original, the index, the orphan checks and the cross-references all depend on the LLM remembering to do them. That works for a while. Somewhere past a few hundred pages it starts to slip quietly: a renamed page leaves dead links, a new page never makes it into the index, a summary drops a field the others have. IWE turns those into commands the agent runs and checks the result of.

• index.md becomes inclusion links. A link alone on its own line is a parent → child edge. An index or section page is just a list of those, and a page can have more than one parent. iwe tree prints the hierarchy; iwe find --included-by wiki/concepts lists one section.
• Lint becomes partly deterministic. iwe stats lists orphan pages. iwe schema validate checks every page against a schema (required frontmatter fields, enum values, dates, which sections and in what order). The LLM still has to spot contradictions and stale claims; it no longer has to remember the structural checks.
• Refactoring keeps links intact. iwe rename old-key new-key rewrites every reference to the page. iwe extract lifts a section into its own page and leaves a link behind.
• Dataview becomes a query. iwe find --filter '{type: entity}' over frontmatter, plus graph relations (--included-by, --referenced-by). Same language from the CLI and from the MCP server.
• Search. iwe find --lexical "query" is BM25 over titles and bodies. It is not semantic search; if you need vectors, qmd from the original still fits alongside.

Setup

brew install iwe-org/iwe/iwe      # or: npm install -g @iwe-org/iwe, or cargo install iwe iwes iwec
mkdir my-wiki && cd my-wiki && iwe init

Give the agent IWE's tools. For Claude Code:

/plugin marketplace add iwe-org/skills
/plugin install iwe@iwe-org

For Codex or any other MCP client, add the iwec MCP server with the wiki folder as its working directory (agent connection guide).

Layout, same three layers as the original:

raw/                 immutable sources (the LLM reads, never writes)
wiki/
  index.md           inclusion links to the section pages
  log.md             append-only, "## [2026-10-04] ingest | Title"
  sources/  entities/  concepts/
AGENTS.md            the schema (CLAUDE.md for Claude Code)
.iwe/schemas/        page-type schemas, bound by glob in .iwe/config.toml

A page-type schema, for example for source summaries:

$schema: https://document-schema.org/draft/2026-06/schema
description: a summary of one raw source
frontmatter:
  type: object
  required: [type, source, ingested]
  properties:
    type: { const: source }
    source: { type: string }
    ingested: { type: string, format: date }

Operations on IWE

Ingest. Same flow as the original. Two additions for the schema file: after writing pages, run iwe schema validate and fix what it reports; every new page gets an inclusion link from its section page, so nothing is created as an orphan.

Query. Start from the index or iwe find --lexical, then pull a page with its children (iwe retrieve -k <page> -d 1). Good answers still get filed back as pages, linked from where they belong.

Lint. iwe stats for orphans, iwe schema validate for shape, then the LLM pass for contradictions, stale claims and missing pages.

Log. Unchanged. The grep trick from the original still works.

The IDE part

The original runs the agent in one window and Obsidian in the other. iWe for Mac puts them in one: it connects the Claude Code or Codex you already use, the agent sees the page you have open, its edits land in the document while you watch, and one ⌘Z undoes a whole run. Obsidian and your editor keep working on the same folder; there is nothing to import. The app is free, macOS 15+, and not open source (the CLI and MCP server are).

What's still discipline

• Contradictions and stale claims are judgment calls; the LLM still makes them.
• A schema checks shape, not truth. A page can validate and still be wrong.
• The index-in-context approach still has the same ceiling as in the original; past it, lean on queries instead of reading the index.

Paste this into your agent

Set up an LLM Wiki in this folder using IWE: install it (brew install iwe-org/iwe/iwe),
run `iwe init`, create raw/ and wiki/ with index.md and log.md, and write an AGENTS.md
that describes ingest, query and lint using `iwe find`, `iwe retrieve`, `iwe stats` and
`iwe schema validate`. Docs: https://iwe.md/docs/agentic/

https://nexusyn.ai/