The Wiki That Compounds

Karpathy's pattern, dormant-by-default in Amplifier

The Problem

RAG rediscovers knowledge from scratch on every query — and throws it away

Nothing an agent learns accumulates. The compounding alternative is Karpathy's LLM-Wiki: the wiki itself becomes the persistent, cross-referenced artifact.

And it's not just a concept — it ships as inspectable code.

RAG today"The LLM is rediscovering knowledge from scratch on every question. There's no accumulation."

LLM-Wiki instead"The wiki is a persistent, compounding artifact." — vendored Karpathy pattern doc

Proof

The whole mechanism is tiny, shipped, and inspectable

1,426 authored lines total across the microsoft/amplifier-bundle-llm-wiki repo — five /wiki-* modes, one specialist agent, context, docs, and reference scripts.

So what pattern do those 1,426 lines actually package?

1,426

authored lines total

5

/wiki-* modes (525 lines)

1

wiki-policy-designer agent (353 lines)

29

commits, single author

The Pattern

An index and a log query at moderate scale — with no RAG infrastructure

Karpathy's LLM-Wiki uses index.md as a catalog read first, plus an append-only log.md timeline. Both are load-bearing navigation, made first-class in the June 16 backbone PR.

A good pattern — but standing it up normally has a cost.

# index.md — catalog, read first by /wiki-query
# log.md — append-only greppable timeline
## [2026-04-02] ingest | Article Title

# "works surprisingly well at moderate scale
# (~100 sources, ~hundreds of pages) and avoids
# the need for embedding-based RAG infrastructure"

The Tension

A compounding knowledge system normally means an always-on apparatus

Exactly the thing you don't want loaded into every session by default. That cost is what blocks shipping a good pattern to everyone — orientation, context, and config taxing sessions that never touch a wiki.

This bundle refuses that trade-off.

The Mechanism

The behavior file is a pure install-anchor — composing costs zero tokens

12 lines, no includes, no context, no session config. The only three grep hits for those keys are comment lines. Nothing loads until you activate a mode.

But if it's dormant, does the pattern still show up when you need it?

# behaviors/llm-wiki.yaml — 12 lines
# grep includes|context|contributes
  9: # includes: (none)
 10: # context:  (none)
 11: # contributes: (none)
# → all 3 hits are comments
# → zero active keys, zero tokens

The Turn

Orientation loads only on demand — and unmounts on exit

Each of the five modes mounts the orientation plus the vendored Karpathy doc via contributes.context when active, then unmounts on exit. All five modes are read-first locked: default_action: block.

Zero cost when idle, full pattern when used — which is what earns it a default.

5/5

modes mount docs/llm-wiki-pattern.md on activation

5/5

modes set default_action: block (read-first)

The Payoff

Zero-cost-when-dormant is exactly what earns default-on

Because a composed-but-idle bundle adds nothing, amplifier-foundation v2.1.2 includes llm-wiki default-on for everyone — line 36 of the live bundle.md, right beside recipes, skills, and superpowers.

The mechanism is precisely what earned it universal shipping.

foundation v2.1.2bundle.md line 36 includes the llm-wiki behavior directly (verified LIVE against microsoft/amplifier-foundation@main)

Default-on, not opt-inListed in the top-level includes beside recipes / skills / superpowers

The Takeaway

Make the mechanism free when dormant, and you can ship the good default to everyone

The install-anchor pattern generalizes beyond wikis: pay for capability only on activation, and universal shipping stops being a per-session tax. The bundle ships mechanism only — projects bring their own policy.

Compounding knowledge, on for all — at no cost when idle.

Sources

Research Methodology

Subject: microsoft/amplifier-bundle-llm-wiki (bundle v0.2.0, MIT). Clone HEAD == origin/main == 091df98.

Feature status: Active — default-on in amplifier-foundation (LIVE v2.1.2).

Timeline verified from git: 29 commits, 100% Brian Krabach; first 2026-05-20 (ab8c726), last 2026-06-16 (091df98). GitHub repo created 2026-05-29.

Commands run:

ls modes/*.md | wc -l → 5 modes; ls agents/*.md | wc -l → 1 agent
wc -l across modes/agents/context/docs/scripts → 1,426 lines total
wc -l + grep -n 'includes|context|contributes' behaviors/llm-wiki.yaml → 12 lines, 3 comment-only hits
grep -l 'docs/llm-wiki-pattern.md' modes/*.md | wc -l → 5; grep -l 'default_action: block' modes/*.md | wc -l → 5
curl -s .../amplifier-foundation/main/bundle.md | grep -n wiki → v2.1.2, include at line 36 (LIVE)
gh api repos/microsoft/amplifier-bundle-llm-wiki → created 2026-05-29, MIT

Gaps: Karpathy gist's original publish date is README-asserted ("April 2026"), not independently verified. The 91-warnings-across-91-cycles figure is grounded in this repo's CHANGELOG; the adopting project's own logs were not present locally. The "nobody wants an always-on default" framing is narrative motivation, not a surveyed quote.

Primary contributors: Brian Krabach (29/29 commits, sole committer). Andrej Karpathy — originator of the LLM-Wiki pattern (gist vendored as docs/llm-wiki-pattern.md), not a repo committer.