SnapshotJuly 2026a point-in-time write-up, left as written

Connect everything

The more Claude can access on demand, the better the work.

The job is to build paths to discovery: sharp AGENTS.md, well-described Skills, a .md wiki of everything that matters, and clones of relevant remote sources. Connectedness is what turns a pile of files into a system.

Sharp AGENTS.md as the entry point

AGENTS.md is the first thing Claude reads on every session. Treat it as the index, not the encyclopedia. It should:

The entry point’s job is to make the next hop obvious.

Skill frontmatter as a discovery hook

Skills live outside AGENTS.md but are discovered through their frontmatter descriptions (see Skills). A Skill with a vague description hides; one with a specific description fires when the matching task appears. Treat the description as a query-target pair: what phrases in a user prompt should make this Skill load?

The .md wiki

Beyond AGENTS.md and Skills, most projects accumulate a folder of .md files that capture the project’s knowledge over time: research artifacts, architecture decisions, competitor notes, customer interviews, meeting summaries. This is the project wiki.

Organize it with a flat-ish structure and clear filenames:

This is essentially the pattern Andrej Karpathy has called an LLM-backed personal wiki: LLMs summarize, cross-reference, and maintain the knowledge base, while you feed raw material in. The pattern has spawned a small ecosystem of Obsidian plugins, local-first variants, and visual explorers.

The knowledge graph

Markdown as the medium covered the mechanics of cross-linking (markdown links vs. wikilinks). The payoff at the project level: when .md files reliably cross-link, the folder becomes a graph, and Claude traverses that graph the way a new engineer would: clicking through, building understanding across multiple files.

Obsidian has deep community experience turning .md folders into browsable knowledge graphs; its graph view visualizes what the LLM has connected. Worth looking at once even if you don’t adopt Obsidian full-time, because it makes the shape of your project legible.

Cloning remote sources into local .md

Anything Claude needs to reference repeatedly should live locally, not behind an API call. Common cases:

The rule: remote when it’s dynamic, local when it’s reference material.

Paths from broad to specific

A well-connected project has obvious paths from the general to the specific:

AGENTS.md
  └─ "See specs/current/ for architecture"
     └─ specs/current/index.md
        └─ "See specs/current/auth.md for auth design"
           └─ specs/current/auth.md
              └─ "Implementation in src/auth/"

Claude follows these paths the same way a new engineer would. Invest in making the paths obvious and the project becomes progressively easier to work in, for Claude and for humans.

Resources