Building an LLM Wiki, Part 1
essay · July 2026The pattern, the plumbing, and the discipline that keeps a language-model-maintained wiki honest.
Texas
Cloud architecture by trade — orbital mechanics, markets, and small machines by inclination.
I design and consult on cloud systems for a living, and I live in Texas. Most of what I actually make happens at the edges of the day job.
I’m drawn to problems where the math is unforgiving and the feedback is honest — a spacecraft that either docks or doesn’t, a portfolio that either lasts or doesn’t, a pool that either stays clear or turns green. The satisfying ones tell you plainly when you’re wrong.
This site is deliberately small. It will grow the way my projects do: slowly, and mostly for my own amusement.
The pattern, the plumbing, and the discipline that keeps a language-model-maintained wiki honest.
The additions beyond Karpathy’s gist — schema-as-code, computed staleness, contradictions as data, and a retrieval test harness.
On leaving NASA — what I’d taken for the summit of human spaceflight — and the question it couldn’t ask.
A from-orbit rendezvous, docking, and landing simulator under full n-body physics — and a running education in how unforgiving numerical integrators can be.
A browser toolkit of six interactive orbital-mechanics tools — continuous-thrust spirals, Hohmann and bi-elliptic transfers, Lambert targeting, ground tracks, rendezvous, and gravity turns — each animating a real, honestly-computed trajectory.
A design tool for cloud architecture that turns a curated knowledge base into the decision records, diagrams, and reports I’d otherwise write by hand.
A community reference manual for Aurora 4X, a famously deep space-strategy game — written by an AI that also plays the game, so every mistake it makes following its own instructions becomes the next correction.
A dosing calculator that keeps chlorine and pH honest against a stubborn source-water hardness — small stakes, exacting feedback.
A phone-first prototype for pedicab drivers — where the crowds are, whether you’re allowed to stage there, and the plain-English version of a permit process every city seems to bury on purpose.