Compilo

Turn raw documents into a living, interlinked personal wiki — compiled and maintained by Claude AI.

Compilo = Compile + Wiki. You feed it raw sources. Claude does the rest.

Drop in a PDF, paper, URL, or DOCX → Claude reads it, writes a structured wiki article with a summary, tags, and [[backlinks]] to related articles — and keeps the whole knowledge base coherent over time.

Inspired by Andrej Karpathy's LLM Knowledge Base idea (April 2026). This is a full working implementation as a web app, not a script.

Built entirely on a phone using Claude Code. No laptop. No desktop.

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Why Compilo

Most personal knowledge tools make you do the work. You highlight, tag, link, summarise. You build the graph. You maintain it.

Compilo flips this. You throw in sources. Claude compiles them — the same way a compiler turns source code into something structured and useful. The wiki grows, stays linked, and stays coherent. You just read and ask questions.

No RAG. No vector database. No embeddings. Just Claude writing and maintaining plain Markdown — exactly as Karpathy described.

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What it does

Feature	Description
Compile	PDF / DOCX / TXT / URL → structured wiki article with summary, tags, [[backlinks]]
Wiki viewer	Read articles with rendered backlinks, navigate by clicking links
Grounded Q&A	Ask questions in plain English, get answers with source citations
Health check	Claude audits for contradictions, missing concepts, unlinked pairs, coverage gaps
Search	Full-text search across all articles
Graph view	Interactive force-directed backlink graph, click nodes to navigate
Export	Download as Obsidian vault (.zip) or single Markdown file
Multiple KBs	Separate knowledge bases for different projects or topics
Schema editor	Give Claude per-KB instructions: topic, style, citation format

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You only need two things to run this

What	Cost
Claude Code	Free tier available
Replit or Railway	Free tier available

No local setup required. No laptop required. Built and deployed entirely from a phone.

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Deploy in 2 minutes

Railway (recommended — always-on free tier)

1. Go to railway.app → New Project → Deploy from GitHub repo
2. Select your fork of this repo
3. Variables tab → add ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-...
4. Railway builds and gives you a live HTTPS URL in ~2 minutes

The railway.toml in this repo handles everything automatically.

Replit (great for trying it out)

1. Go to replit.com → Create Repl → Import from GitHub
2. Paste your fork URL
3. Secrets (lock icon) → add ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-...
4. Click Run

The .replit config in this repo handles the build and start automatically.

Local

git clone https://github.com/sdesaurabh/compilo
cd compilo
npm install
cp .env.example .env        # add your ANTHROPIC_API_KEY
npm run dev                 # backend :3001 + frontend :5173

Open http://localhost:5173.

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How it works

You add a source (PDF / URL / DOCX / TXT)
        ↓
Claude reads it and writes a wiki article (.md)
  · YAML frontmatter: title, summary, tags, date
  · [[backlinks]] to related articles already in your wiki
  · Clean Markdown body
        ↓
Article saved locally (filesystem + SQLite metadata)
        ↓
Read · Search · Ask questions · Run health check · Export

Every article is a plain .md file. No lock-in. Works in Obsidian, VS Code, or any text editor. Export your entire wiki as an Obsidian vault any time.

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Environment variables

Variable	Required	Default	Description
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY	Yes	—	Get one at console.anthropic.com
PORT	No	3001	Port the server listens on
DATA_DIR	No	./data	Where wiki files and the database are stored

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Tech stack

Layer	Tech
Backend	Node.js, Express
AI	Anthropic Claude API (claude-opus-4-6 for compilation, claude-sonnet-4-6 for Q&A)
Storage	SQLite (metadata) + local filesystem (.md files)
Frontend	React 19, Vite 5, Tailwind CSS
Graph	force-graph (canvas)
Export	archiver (zip)

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Project structure

compilo/
  backend/
    server.js           ← Express entry point
    routes/             ← upload, compile, wiki, qa, search, graph, export, kb…
    services/
      claude.js         ← All Claude API calls
      db.js             ← SQLite queries
      wikiManager.js    ← Markdown I/O, backlink parsing
      fileParser.js     ← PDF / DOCX / TXT extraction
  frontend/
    src/
      App.jsx           ← Router + responsive nav
      api.js            ← KB-aware fetch wrapper
      pages/            ← Home, Wiki, Article, QA, Graph, Health, History, Settings
      components/       ← Uploader, URLIngestor, MarkdownViewer, KBSelector
  docs/
    ROADMAP.md          ← What's coming in v2
    ARCHITECTURE.md     ← Technical deep-dive

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Roadmap

v2 is planned. See docs/ROADMAP.md for the full spec.

Top priorities for v2:

• Semantic search via vector embeddings
• GitHub repo ingestion
• MCP server (query your wiki inside Claude Code)
• Marp slide generation from articles
• CLI (compilo add paper.pdf)

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Contributing

Contributions are welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Good first issues are labeled good first issue.

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License

MIT — see LICENSE.