Knowledge Base Template

A second brain for agents and humans — built on Karpathy's LLM Wiki idea, portable via the OKF standard.

RAG searches raw documents on every query. An LLM Wiki flips it: a Claude Code agent incrementally builds and maintains a living markdown vault — cross-linked, indexed, synthesized. Knowledge compounds instead of piling up. Because it's plain markdown with type frontmatter (the OKF minimum), the base stays portable — git clone and it's yours — and readable by agent and human alike.

The trick that makes it scale without embeddings or a vector DB: index-first reads. The agent starts from a navigation map and opens only the relevant notes, keeping context up to ~28× smaller per query — good for ~500 sources on plain markdown alone.

Live instance: brain.lipowczan.pl.

This template is about managing knowledge, not publishing it — the Quartz / GitHub Pages pipeline is intentionally not included (see Adding publishing later). What you get is an Obsidian-style vault plus the skills that ingest sources, compile articles, answer questions, lint for quality, and keep navigation indexes current.

What you get

• content/ — your vault. Topic folders hold notes; _raw/ is the ingest drop zone; _indexes/ holds auto-maintained navigation files; _outputs/ holds generated answers and reports; templates/ holds note templates.
• .claude/skills/ + .claude/commands/ — the management skills below.

Quickstart

1. Open this folder in Claude Code.
2. Install script prerequisites: pip install -r requirements.txt.
3. Run /b:onboard — it interviews you (KB name, owner, topics, language, voice) and then personalizes the brain (CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, content/WRITING_STYLE.md), creates your topic folders, and builds the navigation indexes.
4. Start using the vault:
   • Drop a file in content/_raw/inbox/ and run /b:ingest.
   • Ask /b:qa what does this vault say about ….
   • Run /b:lint for a health check.

Prefer to set things up by hand? You can skip /b:onboard, rename the *.template.md files yourself, and edit the {{PLACEHOLDERS}} directly.

Works beyond Claude Code

The template is plain markdown files plus instructions for an agent. Drive it in any tool where an AI assistant can reach your files: Claude Code, Claude Desktop (the Code tab), GitHub Copilot (VS Code), Codex, Cursor, or Antigravity.

• Commands go in the agent's chat. In Claude Code / Claude Desktop (Code) they run directly as /b:onboard, /b:ingest. In other tools, ask in a sentence: "follow the instructions in .claude/commands/b/ingest.md."
• No terminal needed. Git without commands: tell the agent "save my changes," use the panel buttons (VS Code–based tools), or use a cloud mode where the agent opens the pull request itself.
• Don't want git at all? Download a ZIP: the Code button → Download ZIP → unzip, and open the folder in your tool.

See ENVIRONMENTS.md for the full tool-by-tool matrix.

Skills

Command	What it does
/b:onboard	Interview + scaffold a fresh knowledge base from the template (personalizes the brain, creates topics, builds indexes).
/b:ingest	Turn raw sources (files in _raw/inbox/, or YouTube URLs) into wiki notes; updates indexes.
/b:compile	Synthesize a new article from existing notes on a topic.
/b:enhance	Improve a single note: fill gaps, add wikilinks, mark reviewed.
/b:qa	Answer a question from the vault, citing notes.
/b:lint	Audit vault health: frontmatter, broken links, orphans, stubs, stale notes.
/b:output	Generate a report/summary (reading list, topic map, timeline).
/b:reindex	Rebuild vault-map.md, catalog.md, graph.md from all notes.
/b:refactor	Rename/move/merge/split notes with automatic wikilink repair.
/b:gaps	Coverage analysis: weakly-connected notes, missing topics, thin areas.
/b:curate	Staleness hygiene: score notes (age, isolation, dead links, duplication), propose archive/merge/refresh, retire confirmed notes to _graveyard/ (reversible).
(skill) excalidraw-diagram	Generate Excalidraw diagram JSON to embed in notes.
(skill) research, research-deep, …	Structured multi-item web research into the vault (best-effort; depends on your Claude Code web tools).

Prerequisites

• Python 3 with PyYAML — required for the reindex and lint scripts (pip install -r requirements.txt).
• Node — optional, only for npm run format (Prettier).
• yt-dlp (+ ffmpeg) on PATH — optional, only for ingesting YouTube URLs.

Adding publishing later

This template omits the Quartz static-site pipeline and the optional brain-mcp server on purpose. Either can be layered on top of content/ later without changing how the skills work.

License

MIT — use it, fork it, make it yours. The example notes under content/ are scaffolding meant to be replaced; they carry the same license.