LLM Wiki Pattern
A method for building personal knowledge bases where an LLM incrementally constructs and maintains a structured wiki of interlinked markdown files, rather than using traditional RAG (retrieve-and-generate-on-the-fly).
How It Works
Three-layer architecture:
- Raw sources — Immutable source documents (articles, papers, transcripts). The LLM reads but never modifies these.
- Wiki — LLM-generated markdown files: summaries, entity pages, concept pages, cross-references. The LLM owns this layer entirely.
- Schema — A configuration file (e.g.,
CLAUDE.md) defining conventions, page types, and workflows.
Three operations:
- Ingest — Process a new source: summarize, create/update entity and concept pages, cross-reference, update index and log.
- Query — Answer questions by reading the index, following links, and synthesizing across pages. Good answers can be filed back as new wiki pages.
- Lint — Health-check the wiki: find contradictions, stale content, orphan pages, missing pages, gaps.
Key Insight
The wiki is a persistent, compounding artifact. Unlike RAG, which re-derives knowledge on every query, the wiki pre-compiles cross-references, flags contradictions, and builds synthesis incrementally. Each source added makes the whole wiki richer.
Scale
Works well up to hundreds of pages with good indexes. Andrej Karpathy runs ~100 articles / ~500K words this way. At millions of documents, traditional RAG approaches are more appropriate.
Origin
Conceived by Andrej Karpathy (April 2026 gist). Related in spirit to Vannevar Bush’s Memex (1945) — a personal knowledge store with associative trails between documents.