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OpenWiki: CLI that writes and maintains agent documentation for your codebase

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Re: OpenWiki: CLI that writes and maintains agent documentation for your codebase

#11

Post by bad_username »

rrvsh wrote: post #4

maintaining an LLM wiki has been a lot more effort than I thought, at least if we are trying to maintain a high quality in structure and writing comprehension (for easier lookups both for the agent and human). Are people just shotgunning their agent wikis or how

> maintaining an LLM wiki has been a lot more effort than I thought

Same here. Wikis start out good, but either devolve in a journal-y mess after a while and many updates, or require constant expensive rewrites. (I didn't use the software of the OP.)

Re: OpenWiki: CLI that writes and maintains agent documentation for your codebase

#13

Post by reacharavindh »

bad_username wrote: post #11
rrvsh wrote: post #4

maintaining an LLM wiki has been a lot more effort than I thought, at least if we are trying to maintain a high quality in structure and writing comprehension (for easier lookups both for the agent and human). Are people just shotgunning their agent wikis or how

> maintaining an LLM wiki has been a lot more effort than I thought Same here. Wikis start out good, but either devolve in a journal-y mess after a while and many updates, or require constant expensive rewrites. (I didn't use the software of the OP.)

Wikis start out good, but get stale too quick and become useless or worse confusing.

I’ve experienced this over and over again to strongly believe it.

I genuinely wonder if throwing LLMs at this problem would solve it at least to some extent. Make a LLM agent whose sole purpose is to act as a librarian. It periodically reviews _all_ of the wiki and validates them against codebases, newer docs, anything. Whatever it finds, it should be allowed to intelligently quiz the team/dev whether something is right/stale/wrong and updated it accordingly.

If one tolerates that toil - answering questions of a library bot, would it result in a usable wiki base?

Re: OpenWiki: CLI that writes and maintains agent documentation for your codebase

#14

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

b212 wrote: post #6
dcreater wrote: post #3

What does this do better than just asking your agent to "write docs" or a more robustly defined prompt/skill?

I swear most of these tools are made for the sake of it… While good old prompting is often better than plan mode or superpower skills.

I've had a number of people send me tools like this at work, and easily 50% of them can't answer basic questions like "what's the reason someone would adopt this tool" or "how do you know that it will achieve its stated goals". Agents are good at reading code, I can't imagine what the point of autogenerating agent context could be if it's not showing demonstrable cost benefits.

Re: OpenWiki: CLI that writes and maintains agent documentation for your codebase

#18

Post by rrvsh »

reacharavindh wrote: post #13
bad_username wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> maintaining an LLM wiki has been a lot more effort than I thought Same here. Wikis start out good, but either devolve in a journal-y mess after a while and many updates, or require constant expensive rewrites. (I didn't use the software of the OP.)

Wikis start out good, but get stale too quick and become useless or worse confusing. I’ve experienced this over and over again to strongly believe it. I genuinely wonder if throwing LLMs at this problem would solve it at least to some extent. Make a LLM agent whose sole purpose is to act as a librarian. It periodically reviews _all_ of the wiki and validates them against codebases, newer docs, anything. Whatever it f…

I think writing the instructions for such an agent would be almost as much work as maintaining the wiki and learning your preferences yourself (and both may be coupled intrinsically unless you already manage a large enough notes system). The crucial problem is that the agents lack 1. taste and 2. the ability to know what is good for them. I've bounced off trying these like three times over the last couple of years, twice after Feb 2026, simply because it requires way too much toil that would be better (IMO) put into maintaining your own knowledge base, where at least that toil would result in learning
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