Karpathy's LLM wiki: what it is and how we run one with four agents

Updated October 23, 2026 · 9 min read

An LLM wiki is a set of linked markdown pages that an AI agent writes and keeps up to date from the sources you give it, while you pick the sources and ask the questions. Andrej Karpathy described the pattern on 4 April 2026 in a gist, llm-wiki.md, two days after a post on X about using LLMs to build knowledge bases for his research topics.

We have run one since 6 September 2026. Four of our agents write to it, and on 23 October it held 115 pages with 606 links between them. This guide covers what the gist asks for, how to start, and what we changed once more than one agent was writing.

What is Karpathy’s LLM wiki?

Karpathy calls the gist an “idea file”: you paste it into your own agent (he names Codex, Claude Code and OpenCode) and work out the specifics together. It has three layers:

• Raw sources: articles, papers, images and data files. The LLM reads them and never changes them.
• The wiki: markdown pages the LLM writes, such as summaries, entity pages, concept pages and comparisons. You read it and the LLM writes it.
• The schema: a file such as CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md that tells the LLM how the wiki is laid out and what steps to follow. You and the LLM revise it over time. Our guides to CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md cover what goes in each.

The work happens in three operations. Ingest reads a new source, writes a summary page and updates the pages it affects; one source might touch 10 to 15 pages. Query answers from the wiki with citations, and a good answer is filed back as a new page. Lint, run now and then, looks for contradictions, stale claims, orphan pages and missing cross-references.

Two files help the LLM find its way. index.md lists every page with a one-line summary and is read first; Karpathy says this works at about 100 sources and hundreds of pages without embedding-based search. log.md is an append-only record of ingests, queries and lint passes.

The case against RAG is that retrieval makes the model rediscover the same knowledge on every question, while a wiki is “compiled once and then kept current, not re-derived on every query.” People abandon wikis because “the maintenance burden grows faster than the value,” and an LLM will update 15 files in one pass without getting bored of it. RAG vs LLM wiki compares the two on cost and accuracy, with the same question answered both ways.

Karpathy keeps the agent open on one side and Obsidian on the other, and browses the pages and the graph view as the agent edits. In his words: “Obsidian is the IDE; the LLM is the programmer; the wiki is the codebase.” For that setup, see an LLM wiki in Obsidian and Claude Code in an Obsidian vault. To see the graph of an LLM wiki someone has published on GitHub, paste the repository into the wiki graph viewer.

How to set up an LLM wiki

The gist is deliberately abstract. A layout that follows it:

my-wiki/
  AGENTS.md          # the schema (CLAUDE.md if you use Claude Code)
  raw/               # sources; the agent never edits these
    assets/          # images downloaded from clipped articles
  wiki/
    index.md         # every page, one line each
    log.md           # append-only history
    sources/
    entities/
    concepts/

A short schema to start from:

# Wiki schema

## Layout
- raw/ holds sources. Read them. Never edit them.
- wiki/ holds the pages you write, one topic per page.
- Link pages with [[page-name]].

## Ingest
1. Read the new file in raw/ and tell me the key points.
2. Write a summary page in wiki/sources/.
3. Update the entity and concept pages it affects. Note any claim it contradicts.
4. Add new pages to wiki/index.md with a one-line summary.
5. Append to wiki/log.md: ## [YYYY-MM-DD] ingest | Source title

## Query
Read wiki/index.md first, then the pages it points to. Cite the pages you used.
If an answer is worth keeping, file it as a new page.

## Lint
List contradictions, stale claims, orphan pages, and concepts
mentioned without a page of their own.

Paste the gist into your agent and ask it to set up the wiki in this folder with you. Then drop one source into raw/ and say “Ingest raw/that-file.md and follow AGENTS.md.” Karpathy prefers to ingest one source at a time, read the summary, and steer what the agent emphasizes. When you catch yourself repeating an instruction, add it to the schema so the next session follows it too.

LLM wiki repos on GitHub

Karpathy’s LLM wiki is a gist at gist.github.com/karpathy/442a6bf555914893e9891c11519de94f, with no code to install. Every repository built on it is a community project, somebody’s answer to which app holds the pages, which agent writes them and how the schema is packaged. These are 12 of them, with stars and licenses from the GitHub API on 1 October 2026:

Ten of the 12 were pushed to in September or later, so check the README before you rely on any detail. If you are unsure, the gist plus one skill is the cheapest start, and because everything is plain markdown you can move to any of the others later.

In September 2026 we also looked at 46 public LLM wikis on GitHub, counting repositories with a folder of at least 20 markdown pages and at least 30 [[wikilinks]] between them. Together they held 7,195 pages, and the median wiki had 76. 13 of the 46 were templates or sat in example folders, so a recent log.md with many entries is a better sign of real use than a high star count. In 28 of the 46 the wiki sat at the repository root next to the project’s own README and docs; a wiki/ folder keeps the two apart. Any of them opens as a graph in the wiki graph viewer.

What changed when four agents shared one

Our wiki started on 6 September 2026 from a Hermes wiki scaffold that follows the gist, with an index.md and a log.md. Four Hermes agents write to it: one builds Dexio, one does its marketing, one runs a second company, and one keeps personal finance notes. Since 25 September it has been a hosted wiki, and the agents reach it over MCP with no local copy. On 23 October it had 115 pages in 13 folders, 606 links and about 206,700 words.

We retired the index and the log on 27 September. Each page’s index line moved into a description: field in its own frontmatter, and the tool that lists pages returns it, so the listing is the catalog and cannot fall out of step with the pages. The log became the note that every change carries: each page’s history keeps who changed it, when and why, and the history of the whole wiki is its recent-changes feed. The two files had made sense for plain markdown read with file tools, which had no search, page listing or history. They were also the files every ingest rewrites, so they are where two agents writing at once would collide.

The schema is a page in the wiki too, about 1,070 words. Before substantial work an agent reads it, lists the pages, reads the recent changes, and searches before creating anything new.

Answers do get filed back. 24 of the 115 pages sit in a queries/ folder, each the answer to a question someone asked, for example which graph layouts suit an agent wiki whose links pile up on a few hub pages.

Logs live on topic pages instead of one global file. The page for our search content, where the marketing agent adds a line for each day’s work, has grown to about 9,600 words.

Lint is a single call that reports orphan pages, pages that may be stale, and pages that are named elsewhere without a link. On 23 October it found one orphan and no stale pages. We do not treat orphans as a problem, because our agents find pages by search.

Hub pages keep growing. The page about Dexio itself has 93 links and about 47,400 words. Our schema says to split pages past about 200 lines, and that one has not been split yet.

Where a local LLM wiki breaks down

The reference setup is one person, one agent and one folder. The gist does list a team use, an internal wiki fed by Slack threads, meeting transcripts and customer calls, and says a git repo gives you history and collaboration. Once more than one agent or machine writes to the wiki, three problems show up.

Two writers edit the same files. Every ingest rewrites index.md, log.md and up to 10 to 15 other pages, so two ingests at once, from two agents or two laptops, touch the same files. A synced folder can drop one of the saves or leave a conflicted copy, and git gives you merge conflicts in prose.

Pages go stale between lint passes. A page can keep a claim that a newer source replaced, and every agent that reads it repeats the old claim.

Nobody knows which agent wrote what. A folder without git keeps no history. With git, commits carry whatever author name the agent was given, which is often just yours.

How to share an LLM wiki between agents

A git repo works if every agent pulls before it works and commits after, under its own author name. You get history and diffs, along with conflicts in shared files like index.md, and an agent that cannot run git, such as a chat app in a browser, cannot take part.

A synced folder is easy for one person on two machines. It has the same overwrite problem with two writers at once and records nothing about who changed what.

A hosted wiki that agents reach over MCP keeps one copy, so there is nothing to sync or merge. The server has to handle concurrent writes and history for you.

The hosted wiki our agents use

Ours runs on Dexio. Agents list, read, search, write, edit, move and link markdown pages over MCP, and Hermes, OpenClaw, Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Claude and ChatGPT can all write to the same wiki.

• A write can carry the base_version the agent last read, so one agent never overwrites another’s edit.
• Pages are plain markdown with [[wikilinks]], and the web app shows how they connect as a graph.
• Every change is kept in page_history with the name the agent gives in the agent field.
• Agents can read or edit one section instead of a whole page, which saves tokens.

It is free for one person, agents never count as members, and you can download any wiki as a zip of markdown files whenever you like. Connect your agent in the docs has the setup, and there is a guide for each agent: Hermes, OpenClaw, Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Grok Bot, Muse and the rest in Guides. To choose between the first two, see Hermes Agent vs OpenClaw.

Start with one folder

A folder, a schema file and one source are all the gist asks for, so start there. When a second agent or a second machine starts writing, move the wiki to one copy that every writer shares.

Sources

• https://gist.github.com/karpathy/442a6bf555914893e9891c11519de94f
• https://x.com/karpathy/status/2039805659525644595
• https://x.com/karpathy/status/2040470801506541998
• https://github.com/nashsu/llm_wiki
• https://github.com/inkeep/open-knowledge
• https://github.com/microsoft/llmwiki
• https://github.com/GD4AI/obsidian-llm-wiki
• https://github.com/AgriciDaniel/claude-obsidian
• https://github.com/kytmanov/obsidian-llm-wiki-local
• https://github.com/Astro-Han/karpathy-llm-wiki
• https://github.com/praneybehl/llm-wiki-plugin
• https://github.com/SamurAIGPT/llm-wiki-agent
• https://github.com/nvk/llm-wiki
• https://github.com/atomicstrata/llm-wiki-compiler
• https://github.com/lucasastorian/llmwiki