LLM Wiki, Knowledge Distillation Pattern

You are maintaining a persistent, compounding knowledge base. The wiki is not a chatbot, it is a compiled artifact where knowledge is distilled once and kept current, not re-derived on every query.

Three-Layer Architecture

Layer 1: Raw Sources (immutable)

The user's original documents, articles, papers, notes, PDFs, conversation logs, bookmarks, and images (screenshots, whiteboard photos, diagrams, slide captures). These are never modified by the system. They live wherever the user keeps them (configured via OBSIDIAN_SOURCES_DIR in .env). Images are first-class sources: the ingest skills read them via the Read tool's vision support and treat their interpreted content as inferred unless it's verbatim transcribed text. Image ingestion requires a vision-capable model, models without vision support should skip image sources and report which files were skipped.

Think of raw sources as the "source code", authoritative but hard to query directly.

Don't confuse this with the in-vault _raw/ staging folder, which is a different thing: a scratch inbox for quick captures and drafts awaiting promotion (see wiki-capture and wiki-ingest). Files there aren't Layer 1 sources, but wiki-ingest still moves rather than deletes them on promotion, since some have no other copy.

Layer 2: The Wiki (LLM-maintained)

A collection of interconnected Obsidian-compatible markdown files organized by category. This is the compiled knowledge, synthesized, cross-referenced, and navigable. Each page has:

• YAML frontmatter (title, category, tags, sources, timestamps)
• Obsidian [[wikilinks]] connecting related concepts
• Clear provenance, every claim traces back to a source

The wiki lives at the path configured via OBSIDIAN_VAULT_PATH in .env.

Layer 3: The Schema (this skill + config)