Memex

A 1945 thought-experiment by Vannevar Bush: a personal, desk-sized device that stores all of an individual’s books, records, and communications, with associative “trails” the user builds between documents — closer to how memory actually works than to hierarchical filing.

Why it matters here

The llm-wiki-pattern explicitly positions itself as the first generation of tooling that can actually implement Bush’s vision, because the bottleneck Bush couldn’t solve — who maintains the associative trails — is what an LLM can do tirelessly.

The Memex was not the World Wide Web. The Web ended up being public, hyperlinked, and edited by whoever owns each document. Bush’s vision was private, curated, and edited by you — much closer to what an LLM-maintained personal wiki is.