The LLM-Wiki Pattern: Maintaining a Compounding Personal Knowledge Base

This page describes the operating model of the knowledge base itself. The primary source is karpathy-llm-wiki. The maintenance contract lives in KB.md and the knowledge-base skill.

Definition

The LLM-Wiki pattern is not a file-upload RAG system that reconstructs an answer from scratch for every question. The LLM reads source material and compiles facts, concepts, entities, comparisons, and uncertainty into a persistent, linked set of Markdown pages.

The key difference is simple: the wiki compounds.

Cross-references remain available, contradictions are made explicit, and synthesis pages evolve as new sources arrive. A useful answer can be filed back into the wiki instead of disappearing into chat history.

Why it matters: the accumulation gap in RAG

Dimension	Traditional RAG / file upload	LLM-Wiki
Knowledge shape	Raw documents retrieved at query time	Persistent, pre-compiled wiki
Synthesis cost	Reassembled for every query	Compiled during ingest and kept current
Contradictions	Rediscovered repeatedly	Recorded explicitly in pages
Compounding	Usually starts from zero	Each ingest expands the network

RAG’s problem is not that retrieval is necessarily inaccurate, but that it lacks accumulation: questions requiring synthesis across multiple sources need the relevant fragments to be found and assembled again each time. LLM-Wiki does that bookkeeping in advance.

Three layers

Layer	Location	Role	Mutability
Raw sources	src/content/raw/{locale}/	Clipped articles, papers, documents, and data	Read-only
Wiki	src/content/note/{locale}/	concept, entity, and synthesis pages	Incrementally maintained by the LLM
Schema	KB.md, .claude/skills/knowledge-base.md	The maintenance contract	Evolves slowly

The separation lets the wiki be rewritten without overwriting evidence. Every non-trivial conclusion should trace back to raw through sources.

Three operations

Ingest

Save a source in raw, confirm the important facts, create or update wiki pages, maintain cross-references, update kb-index.md, and append an entry to kb-log.md. One source may touch many pages, but raw is never edited afterwards.

Query

Read the index first, then the relevant wiki pages and their raw evidence. Distinguish source facts, existing synthesis, and current inference, and cite the relevant pages or sources. Comparisons, decisions, and analyses that remain useful should become synthesis pages.

Lint

Look for contradictions, stale claims, orphan pages, broken links, unsupported conclusions, unindexed pages, and concepts that should be split. Turn lint findings into the next ingest or query instead of polishing the surface only.

Navigation files

• kb-index.md is the content-oriented catalogue of concepts, entities, syntheses, and raw sources.

• kb-log.md is an append-only timeline. Each entry starts with ## [YYYY-MM-DD] type | title, so it can be searched with grep '^## \['.

• The next batch of work is tracked in the ingest inbox.

Current boundary and next direction

zh-cn is the canonical language of this knowledge base. en and ja keep the site entry points and this explanatory page translated; they are not independent sources of truth.

The old operations, Java, and architecture blog posts were removed from the public wiki list. Whether they deserve re-ingestion requires source verification, deduplication, and evidence review; previous publication is not enough to make a claim stable.

Future pages should grow three connected networks:

1. Entity pages for personal projects, tools, frameworks, and runtime environments.
2. Concept pages for transferable methods, principles, and troubleshooting models.
3. Synthesis pages for comparisons, evolutions, and personal decisions across sources.

Sources and related documents

• karpathy-llm-wiki
• Headroom Single-Port Synthesis: Entry, Dynamic Upstreams, and Verification Boundaries
• OMP Configuration Layers: Model Roles, Agent Overrides, and Fallback Chains
• Headroom Route Persistence Synthesis: Named Profiles, model_cache, and Recovery
• OMP Hook Extension Concept: Decision-Point Nudges, Hard Blocks, and Status Bridges
• KB Session Ingestion Pipeline Contract: Incremental Reuse, Redaction v19, and Immutable Raw
• MCP Protocol Era Boundary and the codebase-memory-mcp v0.10.2 Graph Workflow
• Headroom 0.34 Compression and Retrieval Contract: Fields, Modes, and Real-Endpoint Tests