llmwiki-cli

A CLI tool for LLM agents to build and maintain personal knowledge bases.

Inspired by Andrej Karpathy's LLM Wiki.

Overview

The CLI is the hands -- it reads, writes, searches, and manages wiki files. The LLM is the brain -- it decides what to create, update, and connect.

LLM Agent (Claude Code / Codex)
|
| shells out to:
|   $ wiki init my-wiki --domain "machine learning"
|   $ wiki write wiki/concepts/attention.md <<'EOF' ... EOF
|   $ wiki index add "concepts/attention.md" "Overview of attention"
|   $ wiki search "scaling laws"
|   $ wiki lint
|
v
wiki CLI (StorageProvider abstraction)
|
v
filesystem | git (auto-commit) | supabase (database)

Key principle: The CLI never calls any LLM API. It is a pure storage tool with pluggable backends.

Install

npm install -g llmwiki-cli

This gives you two commands: wiki (primary, 4 chars) and llmwiki (fallback if wiki conflicts).

Storage Backends

Backend	Description	Init
filesystem (default)	Plain markdown files on disk	wiki init my-wiki
git	Filesystem + auto-commit on every write + git commands	wiki init my-wiki --backend git
supabase	Pages in a Supabase database table	wiki init my-wiki --backend supabase --supabase-url <url> --supabase-key <key>

Quick Start

# Create a new wiki (filesystem backend, default)
wiki init my-wiki --name "My Notes" --domain "research"

# Or with git versioning
wiki init my-wiki --name "My Notes" --domain "research" --backend git

# Write a page
wiki write wiki/concepts/attention.md <<'EOF'
---
title: Attention Mechanism
created: 2025-01-20
tags: [transformers, NLP]
---
The attention mechanism allows models to focus on relevant parts of the input.
See also [[transformers]] and [[self-attention]].
EOF

# Add to index and log
wiki index add "concepts/attention.md" "Overview of attention mechanisms"
wiki log append ingest "Attention mechanism page"

# Search and lint
wiki search "attention"
wiki lint

Wiki Structure

When you run wiki init (filesystem or git backend), it creates:

my-wiki/
├── .git/                  # Only with --backend git
├── .llmwiki.yaml          # Wiki config (all backends)
├── SCHEMA.md              # Instructions for LLM agents
├── raw/                   # Immutable source documents
│   └── assets/            # Downloaded images
└── wiki/                  # LLM-generated pages
    ├── index.md           # Master index of all pages
    ├── log.md             # Chronological activity log
    ├── entities/          # People, orgs, products
    ├── concepts/          # Ideas, frameworks, theories
    ├── sources/           # One summary per ingested source
    └── synthesis/         # Cross-cutting analysis

For supabase backend, only .llmwiki.yaml is created locally. Pages are stored in the wiki_pages database table.

Commands

Wiki Management

wiki init [dir] --name <name> --domain <domain> --backend <type>  # Create new wiki
wiki init [dir] --backend supabase --supabase-url <url> --supabase-key <key>
wiki registry                                       # List all wikis
wiki use [wiki-id]                                  # Set active wiki

Reading & Writing

wiki read <path>                                    # Print page to stdout
wiki write <path>                                   # Write stdin to page
wiki append <path>                                  # Append stdin to page
wiki list [dir] [--tree] [--json]                   # List pages
wiki search <query> [--limit N] [--all] [--json]    # Search pages

Index & Log

wiki index show                                     # Print master index
wiki index add <path> <summary>                     # Add entry to index
wiki index remove <path>                            # Remove entry
wiki log show [--last N] [--type T]                 # Print log entries
wiki log append <type> <message>                    # Append log entry

Health & Links

wiki lint [--json]                                  # Health check
wiki links <path>                                   # Outbound + inbound links
wiki backlinks <path>                               # Inbound links only
wiki orphans                                        # Pages with no inbound links
wiki status [--json]                                # Wiki overview stats

LLM Agent Skill Guide

Run wiki skill to print the full guide, or see docs/SKILL.md for the source. Covers workflows, command patterns, page format, and common gotchas for LLM agents.

How LLM Agents Use This

The generated SCHEMA.md in each wiki contains complete instructions. Here are the typical workflows:

Ingest a Source

# Save raw source
wiki write raw/paper.md <<'EOF'
<paste full text of paper>
EOF

# Create structured summary
wiki write wiki/sources/attention-paper.md <<'EOF'
---
title: Attention Is All You Need
created: 2025-01-20
tags: [transformers, attention, NLP]
source: https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762
---
Summary of the attention paper...
Links to [[transformers]] and [[self-attention]].
EOF

# Update bookkeeping
wiki index add "sources/attention-paper.md" "Attention Is All You Need (2017)"
wiki log append ingest "Attention paper"

Answer a Question

wiki search "attention mechanism"
wiki read wiki/concepts/attention.md
wiki links wiki/concepts/attention.md    # see related pages
wiki log append query "How does multi-head attention work?"

Maintain Wiki Health

wiki lint                  # find broken links, orphans, missing frontmatter
wiki orphans               # pages nobody links to
wiki status                # overview stats

Multi-Wiki Support

The CLI supports multiple wikis via a global registry at ~/.config/llmwiki/:

wiki init ~/wikis/ml --name ml --domain "machine learning"
wiki init ~/wikis/personal --name personal --domain "personal notes"
wiki registry        # lists both
wiki use ml          # switch active wiki
wiki --wiki personal read wiki/index.md   # target specific wiki
wiki search "neural networks" --all       # search across all wikis

Wiki resolution order: --wiki flag > cwd .llmwiki.yaml > walk up directories > registry default.

Requirements

• Node.js >= 18 (or Bun)
• Git (for --backend git only)
• @supabase/supabase-js (for --backend supabase only — optional dependency)

Development

git clone https://github.com/doum1004/llmwiki-cli
cd llmwiki-cli
bun install
bun test            # 210 tests
bun run build       # bundle to dist/wiki.js
bun run dev -- --help

DATA

License

MIT