Open Source · Obsidian + Claude Code
Your knowledge base.
Self-maintaining.
LLM-Wiki is an Obsidian vault template operated by Claude Code — a Karpathy-style second brain where the AI reads, writes, and maintains your notes alongside you. One vault, built to run multiple ventures and client projects. Not a chatbot. A vault maintainer.
$ claude
# plain-english commands:
process the inbox
lint the vault
promote Atlas 🧠/1-Literature Notes/RAG.md
what are the tradeoffs between agent memory architectures?
Three components. One operating model.
Most note systems are passive. The LLM-Wiki pattern makes your knowledge base an active participant — an AI that reads, writes, and maintains it alongside you.
Two streams in. PDFs stay out.
Everything enters through 00-Inbox/, which has two purpose-built streams. Heavy source files never need to live in the vault at all.
The operations schema in practice.
Six workflows cover the full knowledge lifecycle — from raw capture to synthesised concept pages. All triggered with plain English.
process the inbox
index.md, locates the relevant concept pages, and synthesises an answer citing them. If the synthesis surfaces something worth capturing permanently, it writes it back.
what are the tradeoffs between agent memory architectures?
lint the vault
create MOC for agent memory
log.md. When the log exceeds 30 entries, the oldest are rotated to Archive/archived-logs.md in one step. The active log stays fast to scan; the full history is never lost.
rotate the log
promotes: frontmatter field.
promote Atlas 🧠/1-Literature Notes/RAG.md
The 6 Hats as knowledge structure.
I run this vault across multiple ventures and client projects, and the hardest part is context-switching — jumping from a product decision to a client email to a content session in the same day. Each jump costs cognitive load.
Edward de Bono's Six Thinking Hats (1985) offers the fix: instead of trying to think about everything at once, you deliberately put on one hat at a time and work exclusively in that mode. I adapted it for the vault — the six knowledge domains map directly to six hats, so when I sit down in Growth mode I navigate to that domain and find only Growth knowledge. The separation the hats enforce in time, the vault enforces in space.
Cross-venture knowledge stays universal — a concept page on RAG doesn't belong to one product, it belongs to the Product hat. Venture-specific applications get tagged so they're findable, but the underlying idea stays general. It's the same framework behind LexisOps, my task-management product, so a concept page here lives in the same domain as the hat in the app.
"The separation the hats enforce in time, the vault enforces in space."
| Hat | Domain | What you think about |
|---|---|---|
| Product | 💻 Product & Engineering | Building, shipping, architecture, technical decisions, QA |
| Brand | 🎨 Brand & Identity | Visual identity, tone of voice, positioning, design system |
| Content | ✍️ Content & Marketing | Writing, scripts, SEO, campaigns, social, newsletters |
| Growth | 📈 Business & Growth | Revenue, sales, pricing, metrics, partnerships, distribution |
| CS | 🤝 Customer Success & Experience | Client relations, user feedback, onboarding, retention |
| Ops | ⚙️ Operations & Admin | Processes, workflows, tools, admin, legal, finance |
Three page types, enforced by the folder structure.
Zettelkasten's core insight applied explicitly: literature notes are the input layer, concept pages are the output layer — and entities are a third kind of page that accumulates facts about the things you work with. The directories enforce the epistemology.
Source-bound. Capture what a source says — tied to a specific book, article, course, video, or SDK docs. Organised by topic, not by medium.
- → Created by the Ingest workflow automatically
-
→
Marked with a
promotes:field once distilled - → Never deleted — remains as the source record
-
→
A
## My Takesection is yours alone — AI never touches it
Permanent notes. Capture what you know — synthesised, source-independent, in your own words. Standing alone without needing the source to make sense.
- → Created or enriched by the Promotion workflow
- → Filed in the domain that matches the relevant hat
- → Universal — cross-venture knowledge stays general
- → The pages that get queried and cited going forward
First-class pages for the things you work with — tools, frameworks, companies, and people. Distinct from concepts: they accumulate facts over time rather than explaining an idea.
- → Three shelves: Tools & Frameworks, Companies & Products, People
- → Grow incrementally as you learn more about each one
- → Linked from the concepts and notes that mention them
On top of these sit the navigation pages — not notes, but maps. index.md is the LLM's flat master map, read first on every session; Maps of Content are the human's curated "start here" pages for the graph view. Two readers, two maps.
Karpathy described the pattern. These are my additions.
Four specific things I built to make the LLM-Wiki pattern work for sustained, multi-venture use.
## My Take section at the bottom — questions I'm sitting with, where I disagree with the source, how a concept applies to a specific venture, what I still need to figure out.Claude Code writes everything above the line.
## My Take is mine alone. It never touches this section, even when updating an existing note. My perspective survives every AI edit.
No concept page should live in
1-Literature Notes/. No source-bound note should live in a domain folder. The directories enforce the epistemology.
promotes: frontmatter field.
log.md. When the log exceeds 30 entries, the oldest are rotated to Archive/archived-logs.md in one step.The active log stays fast to scan; the full history is never lost. A system designed to be used for years needs to think about what happens when it fills up.
What's included in the template.
(demo) for one-command removal.├── index.md
├── log.md
├── SETUP.md
├── 00-Inbox/
├── Fleeting Notes/
└── Clippings/
├── Atlas 🧠/
├── 0-Map of Content/
├── 1-Literature Notes/
├── Entities/
├── 💻 Product & Engineering/
├── 🎨 Brand & Identity/
├── ✍️ Content & Marketing/
├── 📈 Business & Growth/
├── 🤝 Customer Success/
└── ⚙️ Operations & Admin/
├── Outputs/
├── Assets/
└── Archive/
Remove demo content in one command:
find . -name "*(demo).md" -delete
Out of the box, everything runs on plain-English commands — zero setup. If you want repeatable shortcuts, you can add Claude Code skills (slash commands) in .claude/skills/ — each is just a folder with a SKILL.md carrying name and description frontmatter. That turns "process the inbox" into /wiki-ingest, "lint the vault" into /wiki-lint, "promote this note" into /promote.
The template ships without them on purpose — plain English is friendlier for getting started. Skills are a power-user layer you add once the workflow is second nature.
What this system is — and isn't.
This system has real setup cost. Writing a good CLAUDE.md takes time. The first few ingests feel mechanical. The vault doesn't feel intelligent until there's enough in it to synthesise across.
This is not a productivity hack. It's an infrastructure investment. You're building something that pays off over years, not days.
The compounding effect is real. A passive note system degrades over time — old notes become stale, orphaned, irrelevant. An LLM-Wiki actively maintains itself.
The lint workflow catches drift before it becomes abandonment. The promotion workflow turns accumulated literature notes into usable knowledge before they go stale.
If you're a solo founder or independent builder who reads constantly, thinks in writing, and has struggled to turn your notes into something that actually serves your work — this is the system I'd build again.
"Most note systems are passive. The LLM-Wiki pattern makes your knowledge base an active participant — an AI that reads, writes, and maintains it alongside you. Combined with Zettelkasten's note architecture and Tiago Forte's Second Brain philosophy, it becomes something qualitatively different: a knowledge system that compounds."
— From the LLM-Wiki blog postClone it. Open it in Obsidian. Run claude.
The template includes the full CLAUDE.md schema, all 9 note templates, 6 worked examples, and demo content to show what the system produces. Follow SETUP.md to personalise it in about 20 minutes.
git clone https://github.com/tyrozz/llm-wiki
# 2. Install Claude Code
npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code
# 3. Open in Obsidian, then run in terminal
claude
LLM-Wiki is the open engine. Founder OS is the first paid vertical built on top of it — a calibrated decision journal for solo founders. It captures every real decision you make, reconciles it against what actually happened, and surfaces the patterns you keep repeating across ventures.
See Founder OS → Pre-order · $39 founding price · Ships June 2026