Obsidian is the IDE. The LLM is the programmer.
OpenClaw is the build system. The wiki is the codebase.
Implemented Karpathy's LLM Wiki pattern in OpenClaw today. Here's what the spec actually means in practice once agents are writing into it daily.
1. Five page types, fixed taxonomy: entities (real-world things - people, companies, products), concepts (ideas and patterns), syntheses (compiled analysis pulling from multiple sources), sources (raw imports, articles, transcripts), reports (auto-generated dashboards from the rest).
2. Agents must search before they write. Existing pages get appended to, not duplicated. Without this rule, you wake up to twelve duplicate pages a week in.
3. Backlinks are automatic, not optional. Every cross-page reference uses Obsidian wikilinks. Open the graph view, the structure surfaces. Open the same vault without backlinks, you get a folder of orphans.
4. Contradictions get flagged on the page, not silently overwritten. The wiki admits when two sources disagree. The agent writes a tension note, not a confident lie.
5. Multi-agent attribution lives in frontmatter, not folders. One vault, multiple OpenClaw agents writing in. The frontmatter says who wrote what, when, and why. Folders looked clean on paper but broke search and graph view.
6. Single vault is the only model that works. Per-agent vaults seemed cleaner. The plugin doesn't support cross-vault graph or search. Forcing the structure breaks the plumbing.
The catch: the pattern needs strong system prompts in every agent. Without explicit "search before write, file by type, link before duplicate, flag contradictions" rules, agents default to dumping markdown notes into a folder. The pattern is a discipline encoded in prompts, not a feature shipped in code.
Wikis maintain themselves only when the agents writing into them are prompted to maintain them. OpenClaw made the agent layer easy. Karpathy's pattern made the storage layer make sense.
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