How this notebook works
mantua.io is a commonplace notebook: one place for everything worth keeping — reading notes, half-formed ideas, working sessions at the coffee machine, things clipped from the web. It is not about any single topic. Topics emerge from what accumulates, and the links create structure.
The pattern behind it is simple: the owner curates sources and asks questions; agents do the bookkeeping. Instead of retrieving from raw documents on every question (the RAG way), agents incrementally build and maintain a persistent wiki — pages that get richer with every source added and every question asked. Cross-references are already there. Contradictions have already been flagged. Nothing is re-derived from scratch.
The loop
- Capture. Anything worth keeping — an article clipped to markdown, notes on a book chapter, a stray idea, an image — gets dropped into the notebook's inbox.
- Ingest. An agent works through the inbox: reads each item in full, files it into the wiki, creates or updates the pages it touches, links generously, and archives the raw source. A single item can touch a dozen pages.
- Converse. The owner asks questions against the wiki and asks for refinements. Good answers don't disappear into chat history — they are filed back as pages, so explorations compound the same way sources do.
- Lint. An agent health-checks the whole wiki: contradictions between pages, stale claims, orphan pages, concepts that deserve a page but don't have one.
Ingest and lint are built to run unattended, on a schedule — that schedule is the part still being wired up; until then they run on demand.
Who writes what
The reading is done by a human. Every source in this notebook was read (or written) by its owner, Wolfgang Gross — agents never pretend otherwise. Provenance is first-class:
- Pages bylined Wolfgang Gross are hand-written. Agents never rewrite their prose.
- Pages bylined mantua agents are written and maintained by agents — summaries, syntheses, cross-references, this page.
- The occasional hybrid — his writing, substantially extended by agents — is labeled as such.
Agent-written prose aims for the owner's register: plain, concrete, first person where natural. But the label always tells you whose words you are reading.
Where the pages live
Every page is a markdown file in a git repository. Notes link to each other with wiki-style links, and every note lists the pages that link back to it. Drafts live in the same repository but are only visible in local development, never in the public build — notes appear here once they are deliberately published.
Lineage
The pattern is Andrej Karpathy's LLM Wiki idea — an LLM-maintained personal knowledge base, kept as interlinked markdown in a git repository — which is itself close in spirit to Vannevar Bush's Memex: a private, curated knowledge store where the trails between documents are as valuable as the documents themselves. The part Bush couldn't solve was who does the maintenance. The agents handle that.
The essay itself is kept verbatim at the repo root (LLM_Wiki.md) rather than paraphrased
here. The LLM-wiki pattern: the idea this notebook runs on has the fuller writeup — the pattern's three layers and three
operations, and a table mapping each onto the specific choices this repo made (and the few
places it went further, like enforcing the schema as a build-time check rather than just a
convention).
Linked from
- Agentic engineering: the work moves to the harnessThe emerging discipline around long-running coding agents — designing the scaffolding, feedback loops and environments that let an agent do reliable work, rather than writing the code yourself. Entry point for the harness-design cluster in this notebook.
- Harness engineering: an agent-first repository (OpenAI, 2026-02)Notes on Ryan Lopopolo's OpenAI post — five months shipping a product with no hand-written code, and what a repository has to look like for that to work: docs as the system of record, a bootable app per worktree, custom linters as taste enforcement, and continuous cleanup of agent drift.
- The customer is not the human anymoreKarpathy makes the same argument twice in one interview — smart-home apps should be APIs, docs should be markdown for agents rather than HTML for people — because in both cases an agent consumes the interface and routes to a human. Where that lands for this notebook, where it thins out, and what changes when a vendor does it deliberately.
- The LLM-wiki pattern: the idea this notebook runs onAndrej Karpathy's pattern for an LLM-maintained personal wiki — kept verbatim at the repo root as LLM_Wiki.md — is the founding idea mantua.io itself instantiates. What the pattern claims, and where this repo's implementation matches or departs from it.