My manager gave me two days’ notice to write a mid-year review for myself. Something like that would normally take me a half day to research and write. I finished most of it in 15 minutes and spent another 15 minutes making small tweaks.
I was able to do it so quickly because a few months earlier, I had started an LLM-powered wiki on my work computer. Every medium or large project gets its own page with a Situation, Task, Action, and Result (STAR) section. By the time I needed to write my review, the wiki already had all the project details. I just chose the strongest five and had it format the details for the review.
I got the idea after reading about Andrej Karpathy’s LLM-powered wiki, and I started one right away.
The main idea is simple: a personal knowledge base is valuable, but maintaining one takes too much time. LLMs can now do much of that work for you.
I started my work wiki around April 2026 and seeded it with projects from the past six months. Creating project pages is fast because the agent has access to the original research, design documents, Jira tickets, and code. It can research the project and write a detailed account of what happened and why the project mattered.
One of my career goals in 2026 was to transfer from a front-end engineer role to a software development engineer (SDE) role. I had already been doing SDE work for years.
To make the transition, I was asked to put together a document with my top artifacts proving that I was doing SDE work. My wiki already had every project in excruciating detail, along with the SDE role guidelines to compare my work against. It generated the document in a few minutes. The wiki made the evidence-gathering part easy. The hardest part was getting managers to follow through. Before the wiki, writing that document would have taken me hours over several days.
The wiki has also helped me recover things I had forgotten. When I had a question about a certain design decision, I asked the wiki. I doubted it would come up with a real answer. It pointed me to the exact decision and the reasoning behind it in a project document.
As I read it, I vaguely remembered it. It felt like a footnote of a footnote in my memory. I never would have known for sure without the wiki.
The wiki has already saved me a lot of stress and busy work. But its biggest benefit is not writing documents faster. It remembers my work in more detail than I can and makes that memory useful when I need it.