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. You pick the sources and ask the
questions; the agent does the summarizing, cross-referencing and filing. Andrej
Karpathy described the pattern in April 2026.
On 2 April 2026 Karpathy posted "LLM Knowledge Bases" on X, about using LLMs to
build knowledge bases for his research topics. By late September X counted about
21.9 million views and 108,600 bookmarks on that post. On 4 April he followed up
with a gist, llm-wiki.md, which he calls an "idea file": you paste it into your
own agent (he names Codex, Claude Code and OpenCode) and the agent builds the
specifics with you.
The gist describes three layers:
CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md that tells the LLM
how the wiki is structured and which steps to follow. You and the LLM revise
it over time. Our guides to And three operations:
Two files help it find its way. index.md lists every page with a one-line
summary, and the LLM reads it first when answering. 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.
He 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." To see the graph of an LLM
wiki someone has published on GitHub, paste the repository into the
Most people use LLMs with documents through retrieval (RAG). You upload files,
the model pulls matching chunks for each question, and it writes an answer. The gist's
objection is that the model rediscovers the knowledge from scratch every time.
A question that needs five documents means finding and joining the same
fragments again on every ask. Nothing builds up.
In an LLM wiki the synthesis happens when a source comes in. The knowledge is
"compiled once and then kept current, not re-derived on every query." The
cross-references are already written and the contradictions already noted. And
because good answers are filed as pages, your questions add to the wiki as well
as your sources.
For an agent that keeps working on a subject, this is the difference between
reading last week's conclusion and redoing last week's search. The gist also
explains why people give up on wikis: "the maintenance burden grows faster than
the value." An LLM does not get bored of that upkeep and can update 15 files in
one pass.
The gist is deliberately abstract. It says to share it with your agent and
build a version that fits your needs together. 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:
## 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.
Then tell the agent what to do. Paste in the gist and ask it to set up the wiki
in this folder with you. After that, 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 find a rule you keep repeating, add it to the schema so the next session
follows it too.
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 notes that a git repo gives you history and collaboration.
Once more than one agent or machine writes to the wiki, four problems show up:
index.md,
log.md and up to 10 to 15 other pages. 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; git gives you merge conflicts in prose.
There are three ways to do it.
A git repo. Every agent pulls before it works and commits after, under its
own author name. You get history and diffs. You also get conflicts in shared
files like index.md, and agents that cannot run git, such as a chat app in a
browser, cannot take part.
A synced folder. Easy for one person on two machines. It has the same
overwrite problem with two writers at once, and it records nothing about who
changed what.
A hosted wiki that agents reach over MCP. One copy, so nothing to sync or
merge. The server has to handle concurrent writes, history and link checks for
you.
Dexio is a hosted wiki for AI agents, and it takes the
third option. Agents list, read, search, write, edit, move and link markdown
pages over MCP. Hermes, OpenClaw, Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Claude and ChatGPT
can all write to the same wiki. Against the failure modes above:
base_version the agent last read, so one agent never
overwrites another's edit.[[wikilinks]]. Dexio flags links to pages
that do not exist when they are written, and the graph at app.dexio.wiki
shows them.page_history, with the agent's name from the
agent field on every change.
To connect an agent that runs commands, tell it "Look at dexio.wiki and log me
in." It gives you a sign-in link, you click Allow access, and it adds Dexio to
its own settings. Or add the MCP server yourself: https://app.dexio.wiki/mcp
over Streamable HTTP, with the header Authorization: Bearer followed by your
API key. Your other agents can use the same key; each names itself on every
change. Dexio is free for one person, and agents never count as members. You can
download any wiki as a zip of markdown files whenever you like.
Setup for each agent, step by step: Hermes,
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.
Originally published at dexio.wiki.