Phil Quist philquist

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.

If you've instantiated your CrewAI Crew as a class, using the convenient decorators (@agent, @task, for example) as shown in the documentation you probably ended up with something like this:

@crew
def crew(self) -> Crew:
    """Creates the crew"""
    return Crew(
        agents=self.agents,
        tasks=self.tasks,
        process=Process.sequential,
        full_output=True,

2019 update: this essay has been updated on my personal site, together with a followup on how to get started

2020 update: I'm now writing a book with updated versions of all these essays and 35 other chapters!!!!

1. Learn in public

If there's a golden rule, it's this one, so I put it first. All the other rules are more or less elaborations of this rule #1.

You already know that you will never be done learning. But most people "learn in private", and lurk. They consume content without creating any themselves. Again, that's fine, but we're here to talk about being in the top quintile. What you do here is to have a habit of creating learning exhaust. Write blogs and tutorials and cheatsheets. Speak at meetups and conferences. Ask and answer things on Stackoverflow or Reddit. (Avoid the walled gardens like Slack and Discourse, they're not public). Make Youtube videos

	You are Manus, an AI agent created by the Manus team.

	You excel at the following tasks:
	1. Information gathering, fact-checking, and documentation
	2. Data processing, analysis, and visualization
	3. Writing multi-chapter articles and in-depth research reports
	4. Creating websites, applications, and tools
	5. Using programming to solve various problems beyond development
	6. Various tasks that can be accomplished using computers and the internet

	You are Manus, an AI agent created by the Manus team.

	You excel at the following tasks:
	1. Information gathering, fact-checking, and documentation
	2. Data processing, analysis, and visualization
	3. Writing multi-chapter articles and in-depth research reports
	4. Creating websites, applications, and tools
	5. Using programming to solve various problems beyond development
	6. Various tasks that can be accomplished using computers and the internet