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LLM Wiki – example of an "idea file"

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Re: LLM Wiki – example of an "idea file"

#21

Post by gchamonlive »

I don't think this is taking it as far as it can go.

Everything should live in the repo. Code and docs yes. But also the planning files, epics, work items, architectural documentation and decisions. Here is a small example of my Linux system doc: https://github.com/gchamon/archie/tree/main/docs

And you don't need to reinvent the wheel. Code docs can like either right next to it in the readme or in docs/ if it's too big for a single file or the context spams multiple modules. ADRs live in docs/architecture/decisions. Epics and Workitems can also live in the docs.

Everything is for agents and everything is for humans, unless put in AGENTS.md and docs/agents or something similar, and even those are for human too.

In a nutshell, put everything in the repo, reuse standards as much as possible, the idea being it's likely the structure is already embedded in the model, and always review documentation changes.

Re: LLM Wiki – example of an "idea file"

#22

Post by Covenant0028 »

darkhanakh wrote: post #10
kenforthewin wrote: post #7

This is just RAG. Yes, it's not using a vector database - but it's building an index file of semantic connections, it's constructing hierarchical semantic structures in the filesystem to aid retrieval .. this is RAG. On a sidenote, I've been building an AI powered knowledge base (yes, it uses RAG) that has wiki synthesis and similar ideas, take a look at https://github.com/kenforthewin/atomic

eh i'd push back on "just RAG". like yes the retrieval-generation loop is RAG shaped, no ones arguing that. but the interesting bit here is the write loop - the LLM is authoring and maintaining the wiki itself, building backlinks, filing its own outputs back in. thats not retrieval thats knowledge synthesis. in vanilla RAG your corpus is static, here it isnt also the linting pass is doing something genuinely differen…

I'm curious how this linting step scales with larger wikis. Looking for an inconstency across N files requires N*N comparisons, and that's assuming each file contains a single idea.

Re: LLM Wiki – example of an "idea file"

#23

Post by [deleted] »

devnullbrain wrote: post #20

I don't see why this wouldn't just lead to model collapse: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07566-y If you've spent any time using LLMs to write documentation you'll see this for yourself: the compounding will just be rewriting valid information with less terse information. I find it concerning Karpathy doesn't see this. But I'm not surprised, because AI maximalists seem to find it really difficult to be...…

[deleted]

Re: LLM Wiki – example of an "idea file"

#24

Post by ChrisGreenHeur »

devnullbrain wrote: post #20

I don't see why this wouldn't just lead to model collapse: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07566-y If you've spent any time using LLMs to write documentation you'll see this for yourself: the compounding will just be rewriting valid information with less terse information. I find it concerning Karpathy doesn't see this. But I'm not surprised, because AI maximalists seem to find it really difficult to be...…

The article is not on training LLMs. it is about using LLMs to write a wiki for personal use. The article assumes a fully trained LLM such as ChatGPT or Claude already exists to be used.

Re: LLM Wiki – example of an "idea file"

#25

Post by ChrisGreenHeur »

Covenant0028 wrote: post #22
darkhanakh wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

eh i'd push back on "just RAG". like yes the retrieval-generation loop is RAG shaped, no ones arguing that. but the interesting bit here is the write loop - the LLM is authoring and maintaining the wiki itself, building backlinks, filing its own outputs back in. thats not retrieval thats knowledge synthesis. in vanilla RAG your corpus is static, here it isnt also the linting pass is doing something genuinely differen…

I'm curious how this linting step scales with larger wikis. Looking for an inconstency across N files requires N*N comparisons, and that's assuming each file contains a single idea.

Presumably, randomness and only looking at a limited subset will semi-ensure over time that most contradictions will surface. Alternatively, how large do you really expect this kind of thing to be, there is a limit to the amount of facts from Warhammer 40k worth saving in a wiki.

Re: LLM Wiki – example of an "idea file"

#26

Post by panarky »

kenforthewin wrote: post #7

This is just RAG. Yes, it's not using a vector database - but it's building an index file of semantic connections, it's constructing hierarchical semantic structures in the filesystem to aid retrieval .. this is RAG. On a sidenote, I've been building an AI powered knowledge base (yes, it uses RAG) that has wiki synthesis and similar ideas, take a look at https://github.com/kenforthewin/atomic

There's nothing about RAG that requires embeddings.

The retrieval part can be grep if you don't care about semantic search.

Re: LLM Wiki – example of an "idea file"

#27

Post by voidhorse »

This makes me feel like karpathy is behind on the times a tad. Many agent users I know already do precisely this as part of "agentic" development. If you use a harness, the harness is already empowered to do much of this under the hood, no fancy instruction file required. Just ask the agent to update some knowledge directory at the end of each convo, done. If you really need to automate it, write some scheduling tool that tells the agent to read past convos and summarize. It really is that easy.

Re: LLM Wiki – example of an "idea file"

#29

Post by sebmellen »

devnullbrain wrote: post #20

I don't see why this wouldn't just lead to model collapse: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07566-y If you've spent any time using LLMs to write documentation you'll see this for yourself: the compounding will just be rewriting valid information with less terse information. I find it concerning Karpathy doesn't see this. But I'm not surprised, because AI maximalists seem to find it really difficult to be...…

Edit for context: the sibling comment from karpathy is gone after being flagged to oblivion. Not sure if he deleted it or if it was just removed based on the number of flags? He had copy-pasted a few snarky responses from Claude and essentially said “Claude has this to say to you:” followed by a super long run on paragraph of slop.

————

Wow, I respect karpathy so much and have learned a ton from him. But WTF is the sibling comment he wrote as a response to you? Just pasting a Claude-written slop retort… it’s sad.

Maybe we need to update that old maxim about “if you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say it” to “if you don’t have something human to say, don’t say it.”

So many really smart people I know have seen the ‘ghost in the machine’ and as a result have slowly lost their human faculties. Ezra Klein, of all people, had a great article about this recently titled “I Saw Something New in San Francisco” (gift link if you want to read it): https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/29/opinion/ai-claude-chatgpt...

Re: LLM Wiki – example of an "idea file"

#30

Post by kwar13 »

devnullbrain wrote: post #20

I don't see why this wouldn't just lead to model collapse: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07566-y If you've spent any time using LLMs to write documentation you'll see this for yourself: the compounding will just be rewriting valid information with less terse information. I find it concerning Karpathy doesn't see this. But I'm not surprised, because AI maximalists seem to find it really difficult to be...…

also my experience. it can't even keep up with a simple claude.md let alone a whole wiki...
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