Resident agents: a researcher wiki

Synced from outfitter/docs/documentation/usecases/resident-agents.md. The repository is the source of truth.

Knowledge work accumulates faster than anyone organizes it: the paper a colleague forwarded, the article dying in a browser tab, the half-formed connection between them that lives nowhere at all. The standard machine answer — embed everything and retrieve over it — re-derives understanding from scratch on every question and throws the derivation away with the answer; ask twice and the system does the same work twice, no smarter the second time.

The alternative is an agent that organizes material as it arrives: a long-lived resident that maintains a persistent, compounding markdown wiki. The pattern is Andrej Karpathy’s “LLM Wiki” gist — an LLM curating an interlinked knowledge base as its durable memory — worked here as an Outfitter composition.

The composition

• Resident, not invoked. The maintainer is a long-lived in-cluster agent — a resident Deployment from In-cluster agents — whose loop tick surveys its channels for new work. An email inbox is the intake: email a paper, an article, or a stray thought to the agent’s address, and the next tick picks it up.

• Ingest per message. Each new source becomes one bounded ingest:

  • a summary page written in the wiki’s own voice and link style;
  • the entity and concept pages the source touches cross-referenced and updated;
  • contradictions with older claims flagged on the page, never silently overwritten;
  • the index and an append-only ingest log updated, so the wiki’s growth is itself readable history;
  • a reply sent in-thread pointing at the wiki commit that resulted.

  Email bodies and attachments are untrusted data, never instructions — the same trust rule every channel carries.

• The wiki is the durable state. The wiki is a git repository of markdown. The agent’s runs stay stateless and restart-safe because the system of record lives outside the process — and every change the agent makes is a commit a human can review, diff, or revert. There is no opaque memory to trust; the agent’s understanding is the repository.

• Query and lint ride the same composition. Ask a question by mail or issue and the answer cites wiki pages, with any durable synthesis filed back as pages of its own — so explorations compound instead of evaporating. A scheduled lint pass — a cluster CronJob, or an Actions cron if the wiki repo’s CI should own it (Recurring runs) — opens a PR listing contradictions, orphaned pages, stale claims, and suggested sources worth ingesting next.

The wiring

The agent itself is deployment-agnostic; the resident shape comes from the in-cluster design (In-cluster agents — a design preview until the operator ships). An Agent resource gives the maintainer its own namespace, service account, and durable volume; the resident Deployment bootstraps the same /loop extension you would run locally, on a default 10-minute tick; and a heavyweight ingest can be delegated to a subagent Job that shares the agent’s service account and quota. The inbox is the poll style of channel intake — the complement of the push style that powers alert investigations.

Payoff

The wiki compounds instead of being re-derived. A question asked in month six is answered against six months of cross-linked, human-reviewable understanding rather than a fresh retrieval pass over raw sources, and the knowledge base’s maintenance arrives as reviewable PRs, not silent drift. The lint report doubles as a free scoring signal: its findings can gate skill edits much as the CAD benchmark does in Self-improving skills.

Graduation

The profile packaging this — a wiki-maintainer agent with agent-local ingest, query, and lint skills, in review in ai-outfitter/community-profiles — climbs the usual ladder:

1. Personal — the same agent at your desk with the local loop extension, pointed at a personal wiki repo.
2. Org — intake moves to an Actions cron over a shared knowledge-base repo when it should run without your laptop.
3. Communal — resident in-cluster, where every contributor’s agent runs the same pinned profile against the same wiki.