An LLM wiki won't change your life
Why all the Karpathy-inspired Obsidian posts are missing the point
After Karpathy’s tweet about LLM wikis, Obsidian has been blowing up. I’ve read maybe a dozen posts by now, and they all promise the same thing.
It sounds great: drop your articles, papers, and notes into a folder, point an agent at it, and watch it compile a living wiki—interlinked entity pages, summaries, contradictions flagged, the whole thing self-maintaining.
Let me save you some time. It’s not as useful as it seems.
In 2022, before LLMs were any good at editing markdown, I got deep into Obsidian. I graduated college early and had time before starting my first job, so I spent four or five months building the perfect knowledge base to help me prepare. Then I started the job and never opened it again.
Obviously, things are different now with the state of AI. The burden of maintenance is entirely gone; all the articles are right about how easy and effective it is to create an impressive knowledge base.
But cost was never the bottleneck. They’re hyping up a solution to the wrong problem.
An LLM can connect note A to notes B and C in your vault and answer questions across hundreds of curated sources. None of that changes whether you’ve internalized any of it. AI can’t be in the room when a coworker says something at lunch that should connect to one of those notes—the connection has to happen live, drawing on knowledge that’s actually in your head. People have been writing “I deleted my second brain” pieces for years; having AI build it for you doesn’t fix the underlying problem that storing something isn’t the same as understanding it.
In fairness to Karpathy, read his original gist if you haven’t already. It’s narrower than the posts that followed. He’s explicit that the pattern is for “topics of research interest”: going deep on a bounded subject, building a companion wiki for a book, doing competitive analysis. An LLM wiki is great for that work.
Even outside those use cases, I’m not saying this trend is a bad thing. It’s fun to set up, the results are impressive, and you still gain some knowledge just from curating the sources. But nobody in the recent craze talks about what to actually do with the wiki once it exists.
I do use Obsidian, but Readwise Reader has been my primary interface for the past couple of months. It’s an AI-friendly tool (with an Obsidian integration) that makes it easy to ingest, consume, and engage with content from anywhere—Substack, Twitter, personal blogs, company news pages, etc.
My personal knowledge system is still a work-in-progress, but it’s pretty light and is focused primarily on understanding. I’d rather slowly read and digest twenty articles than build a wiki of five hundred that I never truly understand.
