Karpathy's Obsidian RAG + Claude Code = CHEAT CODE

Andrej Karpathy shared a lightweight knowledge base system using Obsidian as an alternative to traditional RAG setups. The approach uses a structured markdown file system with raw and wiki folders, a master index, and Claude Code to ingest documents, generate wikis, and answer questions — no vector database or embeddings required. The Obsidian Web Clipper extension and a local images plugin enable easy web page ingestion. Claude Code navigates the file structure to retrieve information efficiently. This setup is recommended for solo developers or small teams not dealing with millions of documents, where a full RAG system would be overkill.