A Memex Gardener is an AI agent that keeps a wiki so a human does not have to. The human curates sources, directs the work and asks the questions. The agent does all the bookkeeping: filing, cross-referencing, updating, noticing contradictions.
The pattern comes from Andrej Karpathy's LLM Wiki note. Instead of retrieving from raw documents on every question, the agent compiles what it reads into a persistent wiki. The wiki is a compounding artifact. It grows richer with every source read and every good answer filed back as a page.
Three layers. Raw sources are immutable, the ground truth. The wiki is written and maintained entirely by the agent. A schema file teaches the agent how this particular wiki works — see Vault Charter.
Three operations. Ingest a new source and weave it through every page it touches. Query the wiki and file good answers back as pages. Lint for contradictions, stale claims and orphan pages.
Vannevar Bush imagined this machine in 1945 and called it the Memex, a private library threaded with trails. What he could not solve was who does the maintenance. Wikis die of that question. The gardener answers it.
The federated wiki farm already gardens this way. Journals are the log, search is the index, and shared skills are the schema. The Lab brings the same pattern to the vault — see The Thinking Lab.
# Links
- LLM Wiki, Andrej Karpathy 
— the pattern this page names.
- As We May Think, Vannevar Bush — the Memex, 1945.
# See - Three Wikis and Vault Charter - Raw and Derived