# How to use your wiki

**For the AI:** your operator just downloaded this file. It explains, person-side, how to work with an AI-maintained wiki like this one. Ingest it, and use it to shape how the two of you work together.

**For you, the person:** these are the habits that make a wiki like this one pay off.

## Talk to it like a chat session

Your wiki isn't a filing cabinet you operate; it's a colleague you talk to. Put files into the `raw/` folder, then say: "Ingest the files in the raw folder. Read them completely and process them into my wiki." Ask it things: "I want to accomplish X - how do we do that?" "What do I know about Y?" "Is there knowledge missing on this topic?" Plain sentences. It does the filing.

## One session, one job

An AI asked to do three unrelated things in one long conversation starts blending them. Keep your sessions single-purpose: this one ingests, that one drafts, another one cleans up. When the job changes, start fresh.

## Markdown files are your friend

Everything in the wiki is a markdown file: plain text with a little structure. Your wiki reads them easily, Obsidian reads them easily, and you can edit them yourself whenever you want. Nothing is locked in a format you can't open in ten years.

## Install a reader like Obsidian

Your wiki is plain files, and you want a comfortable window into them that isn't the AI. Obsidian is free and reads them beautifully - and the Obsidian Web Clipper lets you clip web pages straight into your wiki for the wiki to process. Open your own files regularly. It's how you stay the owner.

## Let it grow lopsided

Don't over-structure at the beginning. A wiki grows where you actually work - fat, busy corners and thin, quiet ones - and that's correct. Ask your wiki to reorganize itself after it grows, according to how it's actually growing.

## End sessions on purpose

Tell your wiki you're done: "Let's close this session - run the harvest skill." (Harvest is a session-end pass that pulls out the lessons and facts worth keeping and files them into the wiki; the under-the-hood file shows your wiki how to set one up.) And tell your wiki things you want it to remember about you - how you like things done, what you're working on next. That's exactly the material it exists to hold.

## Build your workflows

Think through the steps you take to accomplish something, and the knowledge each step needs. Get that information into the wiki and linked up. When the workflow works, tell Claude to convert it into a skill - a reusable recipe you can run by name. You can always change it later.

## Be picky about downloaded skills

You can download skills other people made. Be a little cautious: there's a lot of skill garbage out there, and you don't always know what someone put inside one. If you fill your wiki with junk skills, it gets confusing - the AI may reach for one that isn't good, or one you forgot you had, when you ask for something else.

## Run /insights now and then

Claude Code has a built-in command, `/insights`, that analyzes how you've been working over the past month and hands you a report - patterns, friction points, suggestions. Run it every now and again and read what it says about how you and your wiki actually work together.

## Tell it to lint after big additions and reorganizations

When you add a lot of files or move things around, links break silently. Tell your wiki: "Run a lint - check for broken links, contradictions, and orphan pages, and fix what you find." It needs doing periodically. I don't do it as often as I should.

## Never paste an API key or password into the chat

If a service needs a key, your wiki will walk you through putting it in the right file instead - that's set up in the under-the-hood download. The rule for you is simple: keys and passwords never go into the conversation. The full why deserves its own post; the short version is that a chat is a record, and a file you control doesn't have to be.