Build Your Own AI-Powered Knowledge Base with LLMs and Obsidian

A practical guide to Andrej Karpathy's approach for turning raw research into a living, LLM-maintained wiki. Last week, Andrej Karpathy shared a fascinating workflow on X: instead of using LLMs primarily for code, he's been using them to build and maintain personal knowledge bases. Raw documents go in, and the LLM compiles them into a structured markdown wiki — complete with summaries, backlinks, concept articles, and cross-references. The idea is simple but powerful: you rarely touch the wiki yourself. The LLM writes it, maintains it, and answers questions from it. I loved this concept and decided to build my own version. In this post, I'll walk you through exactly how to set it up using Obsidian as your viewer and Claude Code (or any LLM coding agent) as the engine that manages everything. The Architecture The system has four layers: There's no fancy integration or plugin needed. Obsidian and Claude Code simply share the same directory. Obsidian watches the files and renders them bea