Wiki LLM (Karpathy-style compounding knowledge base)

Overview

Most "LLM + documents" setups are RAG: retrieve chunks at query time, re-derive the answer from scratch every time, accumulate nothing. A wiki LLM is the opposite — the LLM reads each source once and compiles it into a persistent, interlinked set of markdown pages that sit between the human and the raw sources. The cross-references, contradictions, and synthesis are already there; every new source makes the wiki richer.

Core principle: The wiki is a persistent, compounding artifact, not a query-time reconstruction. The LLM writes and maintains every page; the human curates sources, explores, and asks questions. Obsidian is the IDE; the LLM is the programmer; the wiki is the codebase. (Idea: Andrej Karpathy's llm-wiki.)

This skill is domain-agnostic — the same architecture works for a P&C insurance agency, a research thesis, a single novel, a company's internal knowledge, or a hobby deep-dive. Only the page-type vocabulary and the schema's purpose change.

When to use

• The user has a folder of sources and wants organized, cross-linked, cumulative knowledge — not one-shot summaries.
• They mention Obsidian, a "second brain", a "wiki", a knowledge base, or Karpathy's idea.
• They'll keep adding sources over time and want the maintenance burden near zero.

When NOT to use: a single one-off summary; a pure Q&A over docs where nothing is kept (that's RAG); project source code (use CLAUDE.md).

The three-layer architecture (always)

The hard boundary is the whole game: the wiki must stay pure extraction so it can be cited as the substrate of any synthesis. The moment a page editorializes ("X should do Y", "the corpus collectively argues…"), it belongs in Output/. Use a > Editorial: marker for synthesis claims and keep it out of the wiki.

Page types (configure per domain)

Default set for a book/document corpus — rename for other domains:

• sources/ — one page per document (the summary that links everything).
• authors/ — one page per person/author (or entities/ for orgs, characters, etc.).
• concepts/ — one page per idea/theme.
• frameworks/ — one page per named model/system.
• Plus index.md (catalog), log.md (append-only chronological), _templates/.

Folder choice rule: person→authors, named model→frameworks, idea→concepts, a specific document→sources.

Instantiation workflow (setting up a NEW wiki)

1. Locate the prior convention. If the user has built a wiki LLM before, find and reuse its CLAUDE.md, templates, and .obsidian/ config so the new one is consistent. Otherwise start from templates/ in this skill.
2. Confirm the three layers + names and the domain's page-type vocabulary.
3. Write the schema (CLAUDE.md, mirrored to AGENTS.md): purpose, the hard wiki/output boundary, page-naming (lowercase-hyphenated), frontmatter rules, wikilink discipline, ingest/query/lint operations, the Raw-traceback protocol. Start from templates/CLAUDE.md.template.
4. Write the templates (source/author/concept/framework + an Output/synthesis). Copy from templates/, adapt sections to the domain.
5. Set up Obsidian-friendliness (see below) from templates/obsidian/.
6. Pre-populate index.md with the full source catalog (you usually know all filenames up front), and seed log.md.
7. Ingest (below), then build the synthesis layer (authors/concepts/frameworks) from the source pages.

Obsidian-friendliness (required — "properties, color-coded, graphical")

• Frontmatter on every page (YAML) → shows in Obsidian's Properties panel and drives Dataview. Always: title, type, cssclasses, tags, created, updated + type-specific fields.
• cssclasses: [<type>] + a CSS snippet (.obsidian/snippets/wiki-colors.css) color-codes each page type in note view (accent bar + tinted properties block).
• .obsidian/graph.json color groups — one color per page-type folder, so the graph reads at a glance; optional second-axis "notebook" tint by a frontmatter field. Color legend goes in README.md.
• Wikilink discipline — [[slug]] for every entity reference, no bare names; link first occurrence per section; aim for bidirectional density. Ghost links (links to not-yet-written pages) are good — they surface gaps in the graph for the next lint.
• app.json: useMarkdownLinks: false, newLinkFormat: shortest, ignore _templates/.

Ingesting at scale (the parallel pattern)

For a big drop (dozens of PDFs), fan out: one subagent per source, each (a) extracts text (pdftotext -layout; count form-feed \f for page numbers; OCR scanned PDFs), (b) writes ONE source page from the template with page-cited quotes, (c) returns compact structured metadata. Subagents write only their own source page — never the index, log, or shared pages (concurrent writes race). Then build the synthesis layer (authors/concepts/frameworks) in a second wave that reads the source pages (not the PDFs) — cheap, fast, and the compounding principle in action. The orchestrator alone rewrites index.md and log.md.

A typical single ingest touches 8–15 pages. Fewer than 5 → under-linking; more than 25 → over-fragmenting.

Raw-traceback (keep the wiki trustworthy)

The wiki is the working surface; the raw files are the verbatim backstop. Put a source-pdf:/source-file: field in each source page's frontmatter. Quotes are short and page-cited (> "quote" — *[[slug|Title]]*, p.N); the full passage stays in Raw/ and is reachable with pdftotext -f N -l N. Only open a raw file for a longer/exact quote or to verify.

Operations (document these in the schema)

• Ingest — read source → write source page → create/update author/concept/framework pages → update index.md → append log.md (## [YYYY-MM-DD] ingest | Title).
• Query — read index.md first, follow [[wikilinks]], answer with citations; file substantive answers into Output/ so explorations compound.
• Lint — periodically scan for contradictions, orphans, ghost links, sparse/stale pages; write the report to Output/.

Common mistakes

Files in this skill

• templates/CLAUDE.md.template — the schema, with {{PLACEHOLDERS}} to fill per project.
• templates/source.md, author.md, concept.md, framework.md, synthesis.md — domain-agnostic page templates.
• templates/obsidian/ — graph.json, app.json, appearance.json, snippets/wiki-colors.css ready to drop into .obsidian/.

Validated by building a 174-page wiki (45 books → sources + 52 authors + 26 frameworks + 51 concepts) for a P&C insurance agency in one session.