Discussion summary
OpenWiki is a CLI tool for maintaining agent documentation in codebases, with mixed opinions on its effectiveness and effort required. Some users compare it to other tools like Codegraph and question its advantages.
What the discussion says
- Some see it as a helpful way to generate and maintain docs automatically.
- Others find maintaining a high-quality wiki with agents more effort than it's worth.
- Concerns about outdated, duplicated, or incomplete documentation.
- Questions about how it compares to simply asking an agent to generate docs.
“Maintaining an LLM wiki has been more effort than expected.”
“Same here, wikis often devolve into a mess after updates.”
Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- extension for pi.dev https://github.com/barvhaim/pi-openwikiby bignet
- How does the ability to search code snippets and symbols compare to Codegraph?by zhengsihua
- Is this the tool that blasted away all the wiki pages for Azure in the repos?
- Needs actual evidence that this is better than not having documentation, only AGENTS.md and letting agents explore.
Having verbose, duplicated, incorrect, outdated or incomplete docs often leads to worse performance for AI
by ricardobeat - I think it's own sub-dir OpenWiki serves as an example of the sort of output you might get:
https://github.com/langchain-ai/openwiki/blob/main/openwiki/...
I agree with others this seems somewhat over-engineered; you can get similar results with a good prompt/skill; I guess the rest of the implementation here is intended as an agent-maintainer.
by mellosouls - Unless it's about motivation and other things that can't be inferred from the code (and comments on such are missing), just ask the agent. Give it an LSP or code intel MCP to do it better.by esafak
- maintaining an LLM wiki has been a lot more effort than I thought, at least if we are trying to maintain a high quality in structure and writing comprehension (for easier lookups both for the agent and human). Are people just shotgunning their agent wikis or howby rrvsh
- > maintaining an LLM wiki has been a lot more effort than I thought
Same here. Wikis start out good, but either devolve in a journal-y mess after a while and many updates, or require constant expensive rewrites. (I didn't use the software of the OP.)
by bad_username - What does this do better than just asking your agent to "write docs" or a more robustly defined prompt/skill?by dcreater
- This is what we do. The same agent writing the code can also write the docs.by _pdp_
- I swear most of these tools are made for the sake of it…
While good old prompting is often better than plan mode or superpower skills.
by b212 - Have a look at the prompts in the GitHub [0]. It defines a System Prompt and specifies the documentation structure. This would allow you to switch coding agents, instead of relying on how your coding agent interprets the command "write docs".
[0]: https://github.com/langchain-ai/openwiki/blob/main/src/agent...
by capplexham - This is mostly a thin clintypescript wrapper around the prompts.
This could have been a SKILL
by TeeWEE - it's langchain, what did you expectby _andrei_
- Yeah I went looking: https://github.com/langchain-ai/openwiki/blob/main/src/agent...by themgt
- We need to make an effort to distinguish “this is a thing for humans” vs “this is a thing for bots” in our naming IMHO. In that respect, “open wiki” is not such a great name. “Agent Wiki” or similar would be better.
Without such a qualifier, “wiki” carries a strong connotation of (usually collaborative) human involvement. That’s literally what it’s famous for.
Thats just my $0.02 on the naming. I definitely think it’s a worthwhile idea. All the best.
by mthoms - I recently noticed people think "wiki" is a set of deeply interlinked documents. But to me it means ability to edit without logging in.by salviati