karpathy

LLM Wiki

A pattern for building personal knowledge bases using LLMs.

This is an idea file, it is designed to be copy pasted to your own LLM Agent (e.g. OpenAI Codex, Claude Code, OpenCode / Pi, or etc.). Its goal is to communicate the high level idea, but your agent will build out the specifics in collaboration with you.

The core idea

Most people's experience with LLMs and documents looks like RAG: you upload a collection of files, the LLM retrieves relevant chunks at query time, and generates an answer. This works, but the LLM is rediscovering knowledge from scratch on every question. There's no accumulation. Ask a subtle question that requires synthesizing five documents, and the LLM has to find and piece together the relevant fragments every time. Nothing is built up. NotebookLM, ChatGPT file uploads, and most RAG systems work this way.

dabit3

See more of my writing here. Also check out Devin

In this post, I'll start from scratch and build up to OpenClaw's architecture step by step, showing how you could have invented it yourself from first principles, using nothing but a messaging API, an LLM, and the desire to make AI actually useful outside the chat window.

End goal: understand how persistent AI assistants work, so you can build your own (or become an OpenClaw power user).

First, let's establish the problem

When you use ChatGPT or Claude in a browser, there are several limitations:

sammchardy

# uses the date_to_milliseconds and interval_to_milliseconds functions
# https://gist.github.com/sammchardy/3547cfab1faf78e385b3fcb83ad86395
# https://gist.github.com/sammchardy/fcbb2b836d1f694f39bddd569d1c16fe

from binance.client import Client
import time

def get_historical_klines(symbol, interval, start_str, end_str=None):
    """Get Historical Klines from Binance

alee

import base64
import hmac
import hashlib
from urllib import parse

from django.contrib.auth.decorators import login_required
from django.http import HttpResponseBadRequest, HttpResponseRedirect
from django.conf import settings

@login_required