LLM Wiki

A skill for building and maintaining an LLM-curated knowledge base inside a project, following the pattern Andrej Karpathy described in his April 2026 gist. The wiki is a directory of markdown files that the LLM owns and maintains; the user curates sources and asks questions, and the LLM does the bookkeeping.

The pattern in one paragraph

Conventional RAG re-derives knowledge from raw chunks on every query; nothing accumulates. The LLM Wiki pattern flips this: when a new source arrives, the LLM compiles it once into a persistent, structured wiki — extracting concepts, writing entity pages, updating cross-references, flagging contradictions. Subsequent queries read the pre-synthesized wiki rather than the raw sources. Knowledge compounds. The user is in charge of sourcing and asking good questions; the LLM handles the summarizing, linking, and consistency work that humans abandon wikis over.

When to use this skill

The trigger surface is broad. Any time the user is accumulating textual material over time — research papers, articles, transcripts, meeting notes, book chapters, customer calls, code repos, journal entries — and would benefit from having that material organized rather than dumped into a chat each session, this skill applies. It is equally useful for one source ("ingest this paper") and for the steady-state operations against an existing wiki ("what does my wiki say about diffusion models", "lint the wiki", "what's missing").

If the project does not yet have a wiki, run the bootstrap step first (see "Initializing a new wiki" below). Otherwise, locate the existing wiki and read its SCHEMA.md before doing anything else — the schema encodes the conventions for that specific wiki and may override defaults documented here.

Architecture: three layers, three operations

The wiki has three layers and three operations. Internalize this vocabulary because the rest of the skill assumes it.

The three layers are raw sources (the user's curated source material — articles, papers, PDFs, transcripts; immutable, the LLM reads but never modifies them), the wiki (a directory of LLM-generated markdown pages — entity pages, concept pages, comparisons, summaries; the LLM owns this layer entirely), and the schema (a SCHEMA.md file at the wiki root that documents the conventions for this particular wiki — page types, naming rules, tag taxonomy, ingest workflow customizations; co-evolved with the user).