🪴 Brain

OpenWiki

4 min read

OpenWiki

langchain-ai/openwiki — an open-source CLI that writes and maintains documentation for your codebase, built specifically for agents. It generates a wiki under openwiki/, keeps it current as the repo changes, and wires your coding agent to consult it. Where OpenKB compiles arbitrary documents into a personal wiki, OpenWiki is narrowed to one job: keep an always-current agent-facing map of the code. That makes it the packaged, LLM-driven counterpart of the hand-written DOX doc tree.

Description

  • Generate. openwiki creates initial documentation in openwiki/ when no wiki exists. If openwiki/ already exists, it refreshes that documentation from repository changes (openwiki --update).
  • Agent wiring. OpenWiki automatically appends prompting to your AGENTS.md and/or CLAUDE.md, instructing your coding agent to reference the wiki when searching for context. If neither file exists, it creates one. This is the same mechanism the DOX tree relies on — the agent’s always-in-context entry file points it at the doc layer.
  • Stay fresh via CI. A shipped GitHub Action (openwiki-update.yml) opens a PR once a day with documentation updates. Drop it into .github/workflows/ to keep docs from rotting — the perennial reason agent docs are worthless.
  • Interactive by default. The CLI stays open after each run for follow-up messages; -p / --print does a one-shot non-interactive run that prints the final assistant output.

Download or use

  • npm install -g openwiki
  • GitHub: https://github.com/langchain-ai/openwiki
  • Commands:
    • openwiki --init — configure inference provider, API key, model
    • openwiki — interactive CLI (stays open)
    • openwiki "Please generate documentation for this repository" — start with an initial request
    • openwiki -p "Summarize what you can do" — single command, non-interactive, exits
    • openwiki --update — refresh existing docs
    • openwiki --help
  • Config & secrets saved to ~/.openwiki/.env. Optional LangSmith API key traces runs to a project named openwiki.

Reasoning for

This vault runs the Karpathy LLM-wiki pattern by hand for knowledge; OpenWiki applies the same compile-once-keep-current idea to code, aimed at agents rather than humans. Worth tracking as the LangChain-backed entry in the crowded “keep the agent’s context map current” space — the automated cousin of DOX and a complement to OpenSpec (see the two-axes framing below). The daily-PR GitHub Action is the notable design choice: it treats doc drift as a CI problem, not a discipline problem — relevant to Brain’s own index-maintenance protocol and to Harness Engineering.

🔀 Where it sits — DOX vs OpenSpec vs OpenWiki

Three tools attack the same enemy (poor agent context awareness) from different angles:

  • DOX = space, by hand. A tree of AGENTS.md files the agent writes and updates inline as it edits — tightly coupled to the code, one doc per folder.
  • OpenSpec = time. Versioned change contracts describing what to build and why before writing code; deliberately no backfill.
  • OpenWiki = space, automated. A separate openwiki/ wiki an LLM regenerates from repo diffs on a schedule, then points the agent at via AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md. Less tightly coupled than DOX (a generated wiki, not per-folder inline docs), but self-maintaining without developer discipline. See Spec-Driven + Self-Documenting for the space/time synthesis.

Customizing

Supports OpenRouter, Fireworks, Baseten, OpenAI and Anthropic out of the box. A few models are pre-defined (GLM 5.2, Kimi K2.6, Sonnet 5, etc.), and each provider accepts a custom model ID. PRs welcome for new providers/models.

Alternatives considered

  • OpenKB (VectifyAI) — compiles any documents into a persistent, OKF-compliant Obsidian wiki with vectorless PageIndex retrieval; broader input, not code-specific.
  • DOX — zero-dependency per-folder AGENTS.md tree, maintained inline by the agent; no separate wiki, no CI, no LLM pipeline of its own.
  • Karpathy’s manual workflow — the hand-driven origin of the compile-to-wiki idea.

Resources

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