scriptorium

scriptorium

Persistent, compounding knowledge base for teams. The LLM scribes don't sleep.

A scriptorium was a medieval room where monks copied and illuminated manuscripts. Here, the LLM is the scribe, you curate the sources, and the wiki is the manuscript that compounds over time. Based on Andrej Karpathy's LLM Wiki pattern — but server-backed so a team, not just one laptop, can share one brain.

Why scriptorium

Most LLM-assisted knowledge tools are RAG systems — every query rediscovers facts from raw chunks. Scriptorium flips it: synthesis happens once at ingest time and is baked into a structured, interlinked wiki. Subsequent queries read the already-compiled pages.

	RAG	Scriptorium
When does synthesis happen	Per query	Once at ingest
Cross-document linking	Re-derived each time	Wikilinks materialised
Where contradictions surface	Buried in chunks	Flagged on the page
Source of truth	Embeddings (opaque)	Markdown (human-readable, auditable)
Sweet spot	Any size	< ~100K-token wikis (then layer RAG on top)

Knowledge compounds because every ingest updates existing pages instead of dumping new chunks. The maintenance toil that kills personal wikis — cross-references, dedup, stale detection, conflict resolution — is exactly the kind of bookkeeping LLMs are good at and humans are not.

Architecture

        ┌──────────────────────────────────────────┐
        │  Scriptorium server (one per wiki)       │
        │  PostgreSQL + MCP-over-HTTP at /mcp      │
        │  https://wiki.<your-team>.tld            │
        └──────────────────────┬───────────────────┘
                               │  Bearer token (per member)
                               │  streamable HTTP
       ┌───────────────────────┼───────────────────────┐
       │                       │                       │
 Loki's Claude Code     Teammate's Claude Code   Researcher's Claude Code
   (this plugin)          (this plugin)             (this plugin)

Two halves in one repo:

• /server — Postgres + an MCP server speaking streamable HTTP at /mcp. One instance per wiki. Deploy with the included docker-compose.yml.
• / (root) — a Claude Code plugin. Its .mcp.json declares an HTTP MCP server pointed at ${SCRIPTORIUM_API_URL}/mcp with a Bearer token. No local shim, no bundled binary — Claude Code calls the remote MCP directly.

Mental model

Every collection has three layers. These are load-bearing — don't break them.

Layer	Owner	Mutability
Raw sources	Humans curate	Immutable. The LLM reads, never modifies.
Wiki pages	LLM scribes write & maintain	Mutable. Updated on every ingest.
Schema (SCHEMA.md)	Co-evolved	Versioned via schema_version. Edit intentionally.

Each page declares one type in its YAML frontmatter. Eleven types ship by default — pick what fits the topic, no presets to choose:

concept · entity · source-summary · comparison · synthesis · decision · paper · experiment · hypothesis · playbook · incident

entity covers entity_kind: person / org / project / paper / model / tool / code-symbol / library / dataset / endpoint / concept-ref — codebases are a first-class case, not a workaround. Don't like a type? Don't use it. Want a new one? scriptorium.update_schema() evolves the collection's schema, audited.

Full spec: server/templates/SCHEMA.md.tpl.

Lifecycle

The wiki has four loops. Each is invokable as a slash command, and Claude is steered to auto-trigger them on appropriate prompts:

• Ingest — /scriptorium:ingest <source>. A single source typically touches 5–15 pages: a source-summary, new entity/concept pages, edits to existing pages, plus an index.md entry and a log entry. Always discussed with the human first — silent ingests cause schema drift.
• Query — /scriptorium:query <question>. PostgreSQL ts_rank finds top candidates → Claude reads them → answers with inline citations [path/to/page.md]. Novel cross-source synthesis is offered for save-back.
• Lint — /scriptorium:lint. The wiki's immune system: dead wikilinks, orphans, stale claims (>180d), schema violations, confidence inflation. Surfaced top-N for human approval. Never auto-fixed.
• Recap — /scriptorium:recap. Save the durable insights from a session before the conversation evaporates: decisions, comparisons, novel entities, multi-source synthesis.

Quick start

As a server admin (host a new wiki)

# Use this template on GitHub → creates your-team/your-wiki
gh repo create your-team/your-wiki --template zyx1121/scriptorium --public --clone
cd your-wiki/server

# Configure
cp .env.example .env   # fill in DATABASE_URL + ADMIN_TOKEN (openssl rand -hex 32)