Andrej Karpathy

Andrej Karpathy is a prominent AI researcher and engineer known as a co-founder of OpenAI and former Director of AI at Tesla. In 2026, he popularized the LLM Wiki pattern — a method for building and maintaining a personal or team knowledge base where a large language model does the writing and upkeep. [llm-wiki.en.md]

Karpathy published a short "idea file" — a GitHub gist titled llm-wiki.md — intended to be copy-pasted into an LLM agent such as Claude Code. The gist deliberately describes the *idea* rather than a specific implementation, inviting readers to instantiate their own version with their agent of choice. [llm-wiki.en.md]

Karpathy framed the LLM Wiki pattern as spiritually close to Vannevar Bush's Memex (1945) — a personal, curated knowledge store with associative trails between documents, where the links are as valuable as the documents themselves. He noted that Bush's vision was never fully realized because of the unsolved problem of *who does the maintenance*; the LLM solves exactly that. [llm-wiki.en.md]

His core mental model:

"Obsidian is the IDE, the LLM is the programmer, and the wiki is the codebase."

In this framing, the user curates sources and asks questions, while the LLM handles summarizing, cross-referencing, filing, and bookkeeping. [llm-wiki.en.md]

• Articulated the shift from query-time work (as in RAG) to ingest-time work, where knowledge is compiled once and kept current rather than re-derived on every query. [llm-wiki.en.md]
• Inspired a fast-growing set of open-source implementations of the pattern, most of which cite his gist directly. [llm-wiki.en.md]
• His ideas informed managed services such as Cairni, which describes itself as running Karpathy's pattern as a hosted service. [llm-wiki.en.md]

• LLM Wiki — the pattern Karpathy popularized
• LLM Wiki vs. RAG — how the compiled approach differs from retrieval-augmented generation
• Vannevar Bush & the Memex — the historical inspiration Karpathy cited
• Obsidian — the recommended human-facing reader in his mental model
• Ingest / Query / Lint Workflow — the three core operations of the LLM Wiki
• Tobi Lütke — creator of qmd, a complementary tool in the ecosystem
• Cairni — a managed service built on Karpathy's pattern