Andrej Karpathy recently announced he'd shifted from vibe coding to something new: building personal knowledge bases with LLMs. Drop papers into a folder, the AI compiles a living wiki, health checks run automatically, answers loop back in. The system grows itself.

Google NotebookLM does some of this too — plus podcasts, mind maps, flashcards, video overviews.

So which one should a writer use? And what would Niklas Luhmann — the sociologist who built a 90,000-card slip box that co-authored 70 books — think of all of it?

I wrote an essay working through all three systems. The short version: both AI tools solve the wrong problem for writers. The longer version is more interesting. Check out my new post!