Karpathy wiki: the parts that map

Expansion of demo-karpathy-llm-wiki. That doc is the public summary; this is the internal "where it lines up with us and where it doesn't" working note.

The Karpathy quote that started this

"Obsidian is the IDE. The LLM is the programmer. The wiki is the codebase."

He was sketching a personal-knowledge-management shape for the AI era. The premise: AIs are most useful when they have access to a structured corpus of your own thinking; that corpus should be a wiki shape (interconnected pages, not a doc tree).

What maps directly

  • The user is the author. Karpathy explicitly says the wiki is hand-curated. The AI is the programmer reading it, not the writer.
  • Markdown is the substrate. Every example he gave is markdown.
  • The "wiki" word. Both his framing and ours land on it.

What doesn't map

Three structural differences:

  1. Local file vs URL. Karpathy's Obsidian example is a vault on disk. mdfy is a URL. The URL shape lets the wiki be addressable from any AI tool simultaneously; the Obsidian shape requires that the AI run on the same machine as the vault (or have access via MCP/file-sharing).
  2. One wiki vs N scopes. Karpathy frames it as one unified wiki per person. mdfy splits the same surface into Doc / Bundle / Hub — three URL scopes that map onto the per-project AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md / .cursor/rules world AI dev tools already understand.
  3. AI as reader-only vs AI as collaborator. In the Karpathy frame, the AI reads the wiki to inform answers but doesn't extend it. mdfy treats the AI as a co-author at the boundary — it suggests related docs, flags orphans, builds the concept index. The author still owns the canonical text; the AI does the assistive work around it.

Where I think Karpathy is right

The deepest claim — that a personal knowledge layer is the missing piece between you and the AI tools you use every day — is exactly right. The disagreement is purely about shape and surface area.

Where I'm betting differently

Per-project context (bundles) and per-person context (hubs) compose better than a single monolithic wiki. AGENTS.md and .cursor/rules already enforce per-project scopes. Our shape matches; the Obsidian shape doesn't.