karpathy-wiki

name	karpathy-wiki
description	Use when building or maintaining a personal knowledge base with LLM assistance. Triggers on ingesting sources, compiling wiki articles, querying knowledge, running health checks, deep research, or initializing a new wiki vault. Based on Karpathy's LLM Wiki pattern with Obsidian integration.

Karpathy Wiki

LLM-driven personal knowledge base that compounds over time. Raw sources in, structured wiki out.

You never write the wiki. The LLM writes everything. You just steer, and every answer compounds.

When to Use

• User wants to ingest documents, URLs, or text into a knowledge base
• User wants to query, compile, or maintain wiki articles
• User needs deep research to fill knowledge gaps
• User wants to initialize a new wiki vault

When NOT to Use

• One-off Q&A without persistent knowledge storage
• Note-taking without cross-referencing or structure
• Non-text content management (images, videos alone)

Core Principles

1. raw/ is immutable — sources are never edited; re-ingest as new version
2. purpose.md anchors direction — read on every operation, align output with wiki goals
3. Classify before extract — determine entity type during Ingest, choose chapter structure during Compile
4. Analyze before generate — two-step Compile: structured analysis → article generation
5. Backlink audit is mandatory — bidirectional links are the knowledge graph
6. Query answers must be archived — good answers are compounding fuel
7. Token budget first — always read index before full articles (L0→L1→L2→L3)
8. Human verifies, LLM maintains — LLM writes, user steers

Pipeline

Stage	Input	Output
Ingest	URLs, files, text	raw/ (immutable) + hash cache
Compile	raw/ files	wiki/<domain>/ articles by entity type
Query	Questions	Cited answers → outputs/queries/
Lint	Full wiki	Health report → outputs/reports/

Each stage appends log.md. Lint and Query can trigger Deep Research to fill gaps.

Token Budget

Level	~Tokens	When	What
L0	~200	Every session	SKILL.md frontmatter
L1	~1-2K	Session start	purpose.md + Concept Index + Dashboard
L2	~2-5K	Search	Result summaries
L3	5-20K	Deep read	Full articles or raw sources

Entity Types

7 types, each with different required sections (see references/entity-types.md):

concept (default) · person · tool · event · comparison · pattern · overview

Commands

Command	Action
init [path] [--template <t>]	Initialize vault (templates: general/research/reading/project)
ingest <source>	Collect + classify + archive (no wiki generation)
compile [topic]	Two-step: analyze → generate wiki article
query <question>	Answer from wiki, archive result
promote	Elevate quality query answer to wiki article
research <topic>	Gap → web search → ingest → compile loop
delete <source>	Safe delete with cascade cleanup
lint	Health check + graph analysis

Conventions

• Obsidian CLI first for page operations (see references/obsidian-cli-cheatsheet.md)
• Structured diff for updates: Current/Proposed/Reason/Source, user confirms each
• Sources traceability: frontmatter sources[] links every wiki page to raw/ files
• Incremental cache: SHA256 hash in .cache/ skips unchanged sources

References

• references/operations.md — Full procedures for all 9 operations
• references/frontmatter-schemas.md · compilation-guide.md · entity-types.md · obsidian-cli-cheatsheet.md
• assets/ — All templates (purpose, wiki article, raw, query, indexes, log)
• scripts/ — init-wiki.sh (with --template), parse-media.py