Wiki index
A compact map of the LLM wiki pattern
These pages reorganize Karpathy's idea around the questions people actually search for: what the pattern is, how it compares to RAG, how the workflow runs in Obsidian, and which tools make the system practical.
Core idea
LLM Wiki Guide
A clear guide to the Karpathy Wiki pattern: what an LLM wiki is, what it owns, and why it compounds better than ad hoc note piles.
- The wiki is the durable synthesis layer, not the raw source pile.
- Humans stay in charge of curation and judgment.
- The LLM handles summary, linking, filing, and revision work.
Comparison
Persistent Wiki vs RAG
Compare classic RAG with the Karpathy Wiki pattern and see why persistent synthesis changes the economics of long-running knowledge work.
- RAG is excellent for on-demand lookup from a corpus.
- A persistent wiki shines when answers should compound into future work.
- The strongest systems often keep both: raw sources plus a maintained wiki.
Workflow
Obsidian LLM Wiki Workflow
A practical workflow for running an LLM wiki in Obsidian: raw sources, maintained wiki pages, schema rules, ingest passes, query loops, and lint cycles.
- Keep raw sources immutable.
- Let the model own the wiki layer.
- Document the workflow in a schema file so the agent behaves consistently.
Tooling
LLM Wiki Tooling
The supporting tools behind a Karpathy-style wiki: index and log files, local search, Obsidian Web Clipper, image downloads, Dataview, Marp, and git.
- Index and log files do a surprising amount of work at moderate scale.
- Local search becomes valuable only when the page graph gets large.
- The best tooling stays close to plain markdown and git.