Compounding knowledge

The property that distinguishes the llm-wiki-pattern from RAG: each ingest improves the substrate for future queries instead of leaving the substrate untouched.

What compounds

• Cross-references between entities, concepts, and sources.
• Contradictions flagged and reconciled (or held as open tensions).
• Syntheses across multiple sources, filed as their own pages.
• The index itself — denser and more useful with every ingest.

What doesn’t compound (and why this matters)

A vanilla RAG query pipeline. The retrieval substrate is fixed (chunks of raw documents). Every query rediscovers the same connections the LLM “found” five queries ago, but those discoveries were never written anywhere.

Implication

Effort spent writing back — into entity pages, concept pages, synthesis pages — pays interest. Effort spent in transient chats does not. Hence the file-it-back discipline.