A pattern for building personal knowledge bases using LLMs.

This is an idea file, it is designed to be copy pasted to your own LLM Agent (e.g. OpenAI Codex, Claude Code, OpenCode / Pi, or etc.). Its goal is to communicate the high level idea, but your agent will build out the specifics in collaboration with you.

Most people's experience with LLMs and documents looks like RAG: you upload a collection of files, the LLM retrieves relevant chunks at query time, and generates an answer. This works, but the LLM is rediscovering knowledge from scratch on every question. There's no accumulation. Ask a subtle question that requires synthesizing five documents, and the LLM has to find and piece together the relevant fragments every time. Nothing is built up. NotebookLM, ChatGPT file uploads, and most RAG systems work this way.

A pattern for building personal knowledge bases using LLMs. Extended with lessons from building agentmemory, a persistent memory engine for AI coding agents.

This builds on Andrej Karpathy's original LLM Wiki idea file. Everything in the original still applies. This document adds what we learned running the pattern in production: what breaks at scale, what's missing, and what separates a wiki that stays useful from one that rots.

The core insight is correct: stop re-deriving, start compiling. RAG retrieves and forgets. A wiki accumulates and compounds. The three-layer architecture (raw sources, wiki, schema) works. The operations (ingest, query, lint) cover the basics. If you haven't read the original, start there.

• 0.1. References
• 0.2. Other cheatsheets
• 0.3. Manage multiple gcloud config configurations
  • 0.3.1. Switch gcloud context with gcloud config
• 0.4. Credentials
• 0.5. info
• 0.6. projects
• 0.7. zones & regions
• 0.8. Organization
• 0.9. billing

name: futureback title: Futureback Product Foresight description: > Project the believable future of a product, then backcast that future into present-day strategy. Produces a two-layer artifact: a cinematic future snapshot followed by a structured decision brief with product principles, opportunity spaces, concrete bets, anti-goals, roadmap implications, and falsifiability criteria. Use when someone asks to imagine a product's future, escape incremental thinking, backcast from a winning scenario, or answer "what does this product become if it wins?" triggers:

You ask one AI a question, you get one answer. That answer