Karpathy Pattern

Community implementations of Andrej Karpathy’s LLM-maintained wiki pattern — the same pattern this vault is built on. Tracks other people’s open-source vault templates, variant schemas, and structural choices so we can compare approaches and harvest good ideas.

This topic sits alongside Wiki Community Enhancements (a research survey of the broader ecosystem) but focuses on specific, individually-reviewed implementations.

The two endpoints of the spectrum are well-represented: the Stride starter (minimal Obsidian template, 4 operations) and synthadoc (architecturally complete Python engine + Obsidian plugin, ~10 operations, SQLite audit DB). When a third-party tool offers a pattern this vault should adopt, the analysis lives at Karpathy Wiki Additions from Synthadoc.

Articles

• karpathy-obsidian-vault) — Minimal faithful implementation of Karpathy’s pattern. Obsidian template with a 4-operation CLAUDE.md (Ingest, Research, Query, Lint). Ships empty, created as a “hello world” by Stride AI Academy. 9 stars.
• Synthadoc — LLM-Powered Wiki Engine — Architecturally complete Python engine + Obsidian plugin implementation by axoviq-ai. v0.3.0 / 231 stars / AGPL-3.0 / 2026-05-04. 5-pass IngestAgent, status frontmatter, query decomposition, hooks, SQLite audit DB. The opposite-end-of-the-spectrum from the Stride starter — formal engine vs minimal template.
• Karpathy Wiki Additions from Synthadoc (2026-05-05) — The specific 5 improvements this vault adopted from reading synthadoc’s design doc, what was deliberately skipped, and why. Includes status frontmatter field, bin/lint-stale-sources, bin/build-audit-db, query decomposition behavior, and per-topic AGENTS.md.
• Pipeline Diagram — How This Wiki Actually Works (2026-05-09) — Single-image architecture diagram of the full pipeline. Six columns left-to-right (Inputs → Staging → Compile → Wiki → Publish → Live) with the /inbox-refresh skill prominent at the top of the fan-in, the three-way triage: fork (ingest | refresh | skip) inside Compile, a recurring Maintenance band on top (Lint / Refresh / Watch / Cross-link / Connection), QMD as the retrieval substrate underneath (7-stage pipeline broken out), and bin/ scripts as the operational layer. Self-contained 48KB SVG + @2x PNG. Date-anchored — newer snapshots get fresh dated filenames, old ones preserved.

Cross-listed: skill-graph plugin packagings

These live under claude-ai/ because they’re Claude Code plugins, but they implement the Karpathy pattern as deliverable software:

• Ars Contexta — Skill Graphs and Conversationally Derived Vault Architecture — Heinrich’s agenticnotetaking/arscontexta (MIT, ~3,300 stars, v0.8.0). 6-phase conversational setup derives a complete self/notes/ops vault + 16 commands (the 6 Rs) + 4 hooks + 249 research claims. Most plugin-packaged version of the pattern. The karpathy-vault is structurally already a skill graph at 270+ articles; arscontexta enumerates three patterns this vault should adopt (promote bin/ scripts to commands, fresh-context-per-phase in /compile, hooks-enforced quality boundary).