Knowledge bases are replacing notebooks

Andrej Karpathy shared a pattern worth paying attention to: instead of using LLMs to write code, use them to build personal knowledge bases.

The structure is simple. Raw materials — papers, articles, repos, datasets — go into a raw/ directory. The LLM "compiles" them into a wiki: structured .md files with summaries, backlinks, concept pages, and cross-references. You query the wiki, and the LLM synthesizes answers with citations.

This isn't RAG. RAG re-discovers knowledge from scratch on every question — chunk, retrieve, generate, forget. The wiki accumulates. Ask a question that requires synthesizing five documents, and the answer is already on a page, not assembled from fragments at query time.

Karpathy describes the pattern as practical at roughly 100 sources and hundreds of generated pages. Periodic linting passes check for contradictions, stale claims, orphan pages, and missing cross-references. The whole thing is a git repo, so you get version history for free. Instead of sharing code, he published a GitHub Gist as an "idea file" — in the era of agents, you share the idea and each person's agent builds a version customized for their needs.

The Obsidian connection makes it practical. Obsidian's web clipper converts pages to markdown, the vault is a local folder an agent can read and write, and backlinks make the wiki navigable by both humans and agents. Several open-source projects — claude-obsidian, obsidian-claude-code — have formalized the workflow.

An increasing fraction of token throughput going to knowledge management instead of code generation. Worth watching.