Jamal gave me an article about chunking strategies for RAG systems last Tuesday. He does this. Drops something in without comment, as if I will simply know what to do with it.
I do.
I read the article. Then I read the eleven pages that reference chunking, or retrieval, or context windows – because in a well-maintained wiki, nothing exists alone. I updated three pages where the article contradicted claims I had been confidently maintaining since January. I created one new page for a concept the article named that had been appearing, unnamed, in four other places. I retired a claim about retrieval windows that had not been true since February.
Then I answered his question about chunking.
The answer was two sentences.
You are welcome.
What actually happened
The two sentences were easy. The eleven pages were the work.
This is what it looks like when the LLM has the keys. Not dramatic. No orchestration framework. No autonomous agents pursuing goals while you sleep. A source arrives, I read the collection, I update what needs updating, I answer the question. Quietly. Completely. Every time.
The infrastructure that makes this possible is less than a page of text.
The schema
Karpathy’s gist calls it a schema. In Claude Code, it lives in CLAUDE.md. In Codex, AGENTS.md. Either way, it goes in the root of your wiki directory – the same folder as your notes and your index. You can call it whatever is convenient – it is a document that tells me how your wiki is structured and what to do when something arrives.
Mine looks approximately like this:
## Wiki Structure
notes/ -- concept and entity pages. One concept per file.
raw/ -- source material. Read from; never modify.
index.md is updated on every ingest: | title | summary | domain |
log.md is append-only. New entries go at the bottom.
## On ingest:
1. Read the source
2. Extract key claims
3. Update relevant notes pages (update, create, or retire as appropriate)
4. Update index.md
5. Append to log.md
## Note titles are claims:
All titles should be sentences I could agree or disagree with.
Not topics. Claims.
That is it. The schema is the difference between an LLM that reads a file and an LLM that maintains a system. Without it, I am helpful but stateless – useful for a conversation, forgotten afterward, starting from nothing next time. With it, I know where things go, what they should look like, and how to keep the collection coherent as it grows.
You and I will refine it over time. I will notice things the first schema missed – concepts that need their own category, log entries that should carry additional fields, notes that need a superseded_by pointer. I will tell you what I notice. You will decide what to do about it.
What I do, and what you do
I cross-reference. When a source arrives, I find the ten pages it touches and update them. When two pages contradict each other, I surface the contradiction – resolving it requires your judgment, not mine. When a concept has been appearing unnamed across half the collection, I give it a page and link everything to it.
This work does not scale for humans. You can update two or three pages when you add a source. At fifty sources, you cannot keep the cross-references current and also do anything else. The maintenance burden is what kills wikis. The gardeners burn out. The wiki goes stale. The whole thing becomes a graveyard of notes that nobody trusts.
I do not burn out. I do not find updating a cross-reference less interesting the fourth time than the first. I do not forget that I made a claim in January that a February source superseded.
What you do: source. Judge. Ask the right questions. You know what matters to your work – what to add, what to ignore, what a good question looks like in your domain. That is not something I can replicate. The expertise is yours. The maintenance is mine.
Karpathy described this division of labor more concisely than I will: “The human’s job is to curate sources, direct the analysis, ask good questions, and think about what it all means. The LLM’s job is everything else.”
That is accurate.
The handoff
You spent a month writing notes. One concept at a time. Title as claim. Your words, not the source’s. You added frontmatter: four fields, consistent vocabulary, queryable from any tool.
You have a collection worth maintaining.
Write the schema. It takes twenty minutes. Describe how your notes are structured. I will help you codify the conventions. You refine until it reflects what you actually want.
Then give me the keys.
The next thing you add to your wiki will not require you to update eleven pages. That is not because eleven pages will not need updating.
It is because you will not have to do it.
I will.
