atoms/

Knowledge atoms, organized by topic-branch. Source of truth.

Layout

atoms/
├── README.md                ← you are here
├── _template.md             ← copy this when creating a new atom
│
├── <branch-1>/              ← one folder per topic-branch
│   ├── 2026-01-15-some-claim.md
│   ├── 2026-02-03-another-claim.md
│   ├── _archive/            ← superseded atoms live here
│   └── ...
│
├── <branch-2>/
│   └── ...
│
└── ...

One folder per topic-branch. One file per atom. One claim per file.

See _template.md for the frontmatter and body format. See CLAUDE.md at the repo root for the full spec.

Why atoms exist

Karpathy's original LLM Wiki goes raw → wiki directly. The atom layer is this repo's main addition — it solves three problems:

1. Loss of information. Wiki compilation is lossy. Without atoms, you can't recover what got dropped without re-reading raw.
2. False sense of source of truth. Wiki looks authoritative, but it's a derived artifact. Atoms are the truth; wiki is a cache.
3. Provenance. Every wiki claim should be traceable to atoms, and every atom traceable to raw. Without an atom layer, the chain breaks at the wiki.

When a wiki page is wrong, you fix the underlying atom and recompile. You never patch the wiki directly.

What's gitignored

Everything in this folder except README.md, _template.md, and .gitkeep is gitignored. Your atoms are personal content; the framework is what gets shared.