ak-wiki

AK LLM Wiki

A plugin for building and maintaining a persistent, compounding knowledge base as interlinked markdown files. Based on Andrej Karpathy's LLM Wiki pattern.

Unlike RAG (which rediscovers knowledge from scratch per query), the wiki is compiled once and kept current. Cross-references are already there. Contradictions have already been flagged. You curate sources and ask good questions; the agent does all the bookkeeping — reading, summarizing, cross-referencing, filing, maintaining consistency. You (almost) never write wiki pages yourself.

Obsidian is the IDE. The LLM is the programmer. The wiki is the codebase. — Karpathy

Design lineage

This plugin implements Karpathy's original concept and extends it with three systems he left open. The table below shows which ideas come from the original and which are plugin extensions.

From Karpathy's original

Idea	Original quote / reference
Compiled once, kept current (not RAG)	"Unlike RAG... the wiki is compiled once and then kept up to date"
Human curates, LLM maintains	"You curate sources and ask good questions, the LLM does the rest"
raw/ immutable layer	"You don't modify raw source material"
index.md — read index first	"The LLM reads the index first to find relevant pages"
log.md — append-only action log	"A chronological log of all actions taken"
Ingest: 10–15 pages per source	"A single source can touch 10-15 pages"
Query results file back and compound	"Queries compound in the wiki just like ingested sources"
Lint: stale content + data gaps	"Lint also finds data gaps that could be filled with a web search"
Schema co-evolves with the wiki	"The schema... co-evolves along with the wiki over time"
Git repo by default	"The wiki directory is just a git repo"
Obsidian as the IDE	"Obsidian is the IDE. The LLM is the programmer."
Everything optional and modular	"Pick what's useful, ignore what isn't"
qmd for scaling search	"qmd... for search at scale"
Web search to fill gaps	"The LLM is good at suggesting new questions to investigate"

Plugin extensions (this project)

Extension	What it adds	Why
SCHEMA.md as authoritative config	All conventions in one file; agent reads and enforces rather than hardcoding	Karpathy said schema co-evolves — we formalized where it lives and who enforces it
Interactive domain-specific init	wiki-init proposes categories per domain (research/book/business/personal)	Karpathy's structure is intentionally abstract — a real tool needs a concrete bootstrapper
Bulk import (wiki-import)	5-phase migration from Obsidian/Notion/Confluence/folders with checkpoint/resume	Original assumes you start fresh; most users have existing notes
Image handling in wiki-ingest	Auto-download referenced images to raw/assets/, rewrite to local paths	URLs rot; Karpathy didn't specify image handling
Structured graph queries (wiki-graph)	Frontmatter filters, BFS neighbors, shortest-path, hubs/orphans — no persistent graph DB	The [[wikilink]] graph is implicit in Karpathy's design; we made it queryable
Custom frontmatter dimensions	Domain-specific fields (e.g. version:) declared in SCHEMA.md, prompted during ingest	Karpathy mentions frontmatter but doesn't specify extensibility
Three-tier memory aging	active/archived/frozen tiers computed on-the-fly from source dates	Karpathy notes "stale content" in lint but doesn't propose a temporal model
External fallback plugins	.wiki-plugins.yaml registers CLI tools (deepwiki-cli, web search) as wiki-query fallback	Karpathy mentions web search for gaps; we generalized to any external tool with a closed-loop ingest pipeline
Multi-format query output	markdown / table / slides (Marp) / chart (matplotlib) / canvas (Obsidian)	Original doesn't specify output formats
Plugin packaging	.claude-plugin/ + .codex-plugin/ + skill files for Claude Code and Codex CLI	Karpathy's concept is tool-agnostic; this wraps it for specific platforms

What we deliberately did NOT add

• Persistent graph database — the filesystem is the graph; scanning hundreds of pages takes milliseconds
• Auto-pruning of frozen content — planned as "auto-dreaming" in v2; frozen = parked, not deleted
• Embedding-based semantic search — deferred to qmd; the built-in 3-pass scan handles Karpathy's sweet spot (~100 sources)
• Multi-user access control — the wiki is a git repo; use branches and PRs for collaboration

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Installation

Claude Code

# Install via marketplace
claude plugin install litianyi/AK-llm-wiki