A Four-Type Framework for LLM Wiki by karpathy
Why Knowledge Alone Doesn't Create Judgment Karpathy's LLM Wiki is brilliant. You dump raw material in, an LLM extracts concepts and links them together, and you get a personal knowledge base that actually works. I built one. 100+ pages. It's great. But I hit a wall that made me rethink everything. The Wall I asked my AI to act as a programming tutor. It could recite every concept perfectly. Student: "I don't understand Promises." AI: "A Promise is an object representing the eventual completion or failure of an asynchronous operation..." Wrong answer. The right answer was: "Do you understand callbacks first? What about synchronous execution? What have you tried so far?" The AI had knowledge. It had zero judgment. And then I realized why: every single page in my wiki was the same type of knowledge. One Type vs Four LLM Wiki 1.0 stores declarative knowledge — facts, definitions, summaries. Things that answer "What is this?" But think about what makes a human expert different from a textbook: A great programming mentor doesn't just know what Promises are. They know why you teach callback → Promise → async/await in that exact order — and never the reverse. That's not a fact. It's a reasoning path. A master astrologer doesn't just know what each star represents. They know why you check 命宮 first, then 三方四正, when to prioritize 格局, when a palace is a consequence rather than a cause. That's not a fact either. It's a decision sequence. And here's the kicker: even knowing the reasoning path isn't enough. We annotated Anderson's (1972) Socratic tutoring dialogues — full 41-turn and 30-turn conversations, labeling every decision point. Knowing the 23 Socratic rules (the reasoning path) is one thing. Reading a complete dialogue — watching the expert set a trap, wait 15 seconds in silence, break their own rules when the student gets frustrated — is something else entirely. Knowing the recipe ≠ having watched the chef cook. And there's still one more type. Student says: "I have no