Bootstrap Wiki

Bootstrap Wiki — set up a personal LLM Wiki

Set up a persistent, LLM-maintained wiki: a structured, interlinked collection of markdown files that compounds as you feed it sources, instead of re-deriving knowledge on every question like RAG does.

This skill is an implementation of the LLM Wiki pattern described by Andrej Karpathy — an idea file meant to be handed to your agent and instantiated for your own domain. Credit for the pattern goes to him; this skill encodes how the Tiro team runs it in production, every day, for personal knowledge, research, and team memory.

Usage

/tiro:bootstrap-wiki [optional: target directory or domain description]

The core idea (tell the user this if they ask)

Three layers:

• raw/ — immutable source documents the user curates (articles, papers, meeting notes, journal entries). The agent reads them, never modifies them.
• wiki/ — markdown pages the agent owns entirely: source summaries, entity pages, concept pages, topic syntheses, analyses. Interlinked with [[wikilinks]].
• The schema (CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md) — the configuration document that turns a generic agent into a disciplined wiki maintainer: structure, conventions, and workflows for ingest / query / lint.

The human curates sources and asks questions. The agent does all the bookkeeping — summarizing, cross-referencing, contradiction-flagging, index maintenance. Wikis die when maintenance costs exceed value; an agent makes maintenance nearly free.

Workflow

1. Interview — keep it short, 3 questions max at a time

Ask the user:

1. Domain & purpose. What is this wiki for? (personal knowledge / research topic / reading companion / team memory / competitive analysis / anything else.) The answer shapes the schema's page types and tone.
2. Location. Where should it live? Default: a new git repo directory they name. Recommend they open it in Obsidian as the reading UI (the agent is the writer; Obsidian is the browser).
3. Language. Which language should wiki pages be written in? Filenames should stay lowercase-english-with-hyphens regardless.

2. Scaffold

Create:

/
├── raw/                # user-owned, immutable sources
│   ├── articles/
│   ├── books/
│   ├── papers/
│   ├── media/
│   └── journal/
├── wiki/
│   ├── sources/        # one summary page per raw source
│   ├── entities/       # people, orgs, places
│   ├── concepts/       # ideas, techniques
│   ├── topics/         # synthesis pages
│   ├── analyses/       # saved answers to good questions
│   └── journal/        # optional daily notes
├── index.md            # catalog of every page, by category
├── log.md              # append-only chronological record
├── overview.md         # dashboard: counts, recent activity
└── CLAUDE.md           # the schema (also symlink/copy AGENTS.md if the user uses other agents)

git init the directory unless it is already inside a repo.

3. Write the schema

Write CLAUDE.md tailored to the interview answers. It must define:

• Ownership rules — raw/ is user-owned and read-only for the agent; wiki/ is agent-owned; index.md/log.md/overview.md are agent-maintained.
• Page formats — YAML frontmatter per page type. Source pages must carry a source_path field pointing back to the raw original.
• Cross-reference rules — [[wikilinks]] everywhere, bidirectional links, contradictions recorded explicitly on both pages.
• The three operations — ingest (see /tiro:ingest), query (see /tiro:query), lint (see /tiro:lint), each as a short workflow section.
• Log format — entries like ## [YYYY-MM-DD] ingest | Title so grep "^## \[" log.md | tail -5 works.

Keep the schema under ~150 lines. It will co-evolve with the user; say so in a comment at the top.

4. Seed

• index.md with empty category sections.
• log.md with a bootstrap entry.
• overview.md with zero counts.

5. First ingest

Ask the user for one real source (a URL, a file, a note) and run the ingest workflow on it end-to-end, so they see the full loop working before the session ends. An empty wiki teaches nothing.

6. Optional integrations — detect, don't preach

• If the Tiro CLI (tiro) is installed and authenticated (tiro auth status), mention once: their Tiro meeting notes can flow into this wiki automatically via /tiro:sync, and /tiro:schedule-sync can make it a daily habit. If tiro is not installed, do not bring it up.
• If the user mentions Obsidian, suggest the graph view for spotting hubs/orphans and Obsidian Web Clipper for getting articles into raw/.

Quality bar

• The schema must reflect the user's actual domain — a book-reading wiki needs character/theme pages, not "entities/concepts" boilerplate.
• Everything in the user's chosen language except filenames and frontmatter keys.
• End by summarizing: what was created, how to add the next source, and the one-line habit ("drop a file in raw/, say 'ingest it'").

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: plato-corp
• Source: plato-corp/skills
• License: MIT

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.