The next step after Karpathy's wiki idea: Karpathy's LLM Wiki compiles raw sources into a persistent md wiki with backlinks and cross-references. The LLM reads papers, extracts concepts, writes encyclopedia-style articles, and maintains an index. The knowledge is compiled once and kept current, so the LLM never re-derives context from scratch at query time. This works because research is mostly about concepts and their relationships, which are relatively stable. But this pattern breaks when you apply it to actual work, where context evolves across conversations constantly, like deadlines, plans, meetings, etc. A compiled wiki would have a page about the project but it wouldn't track ground truth effectively. Tracking this requires a different data structure altogether, which is not a wiki of summaries, but a knowledge graph of typed entities where people, decisions, commitments, and deadlines are separate nodes linked across conversations. Rowboat is an open-source implementation of exactly this, built on top of the same Markdown-and-Obsidian foundation that Karpathy uses, but extended into work context. The way it works is that it ingests conversations from Gmail, Granola, and Fireflies, and instead of writing a summary page per topic, it extracts each decision, commitment, and deadline as its own md file with backlinks to the people and projects involved. That's structurally different from a wiki, because a wiki page about "Project X" gives you a summary of what was discussed. A knowledge graph gives you every decision made, who made it, what was promised, when it was promised, and whether anything has shifted since. It also runs background agents on a schedule, so something like a daily briefing gets assembled automatically from whatever shifted in your graph overnight. You control what runs and what gets written back into the vault. You bring your own model through Ollama, LM Studio, or any hosted API, and everything is stored as plain Markdown you can open in Obsidian, edit, or delete. Repo: github.com/rowboatlabs/ro… TL;DR: Karpathy's LLM Wiki compiles research into a persistent Markdown wiki. It works well for concepts and their relationships but breaks down for real work where the context evolves over time. Rowboat builds a knowledge graph instead of a wiki, extracts typed entities with backlinks, and runs background agents that act on that accumulated context. Open-source, local-first, bring your own model.Karpathy nailed the foundation. The next layer is here.
