LangChain open-sourced OpenWiki—a CLI specifically for agents, which automatically writes and maintains documentation for your codebase. It’s not about writing docs manually; it’s about agents writing, agents maintaining, and agents referencing.

OpenWiki: LangChain’s open-source self-maintaining documentation system for agents

LangChain released a new project yesterday, with 477 stars and MIT license. OpenWiki is a CLI designed specifically for agents—it automatically generates and continuously updates documentation for your codebase.

Install: npm install -g openwiki

How to use: openwiki --init to configure model and API key → openwiki generates documentation into the openwiki/ directory → then automatically appends prompts to AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md to instruct the coding agent to reference this wiki.

Key design: • Supports GLM 5.2, Kimi K2.6, Sonnet 5, etc., with a default list of pre-configured models • Supports OpenRouter, Fireworks, Baseten, OpenAI, Anthropic • GitHub Action integration—automatically opens a PR every day to update documentation • Incremental updates if the documentation directory exists; creates from scratch if it doesn’t.

It echoes all the themes we translated today: • Karpathy’s LLM Knowledge Base (same concept, but now as an automated tool) • EXM7777’s Agent OS principle “keep memory in files” • Memory Update Loop from the 20 Loop patterns

This tool advances the concept of “letting AI remember your codebase” to a single npm install step. LangChain says it is built specifically for agents—not a wiki for humans. 477 stars show that this is exactly a pain point.

Original article: https://github.com/langchain-ai/openwiki…

#OpenWiki #LangChain #AgentDocumentation

langchain-ai/openwiki

Source: https://github.com/langchain-ai/openwiki

OpenWiki

OpenWiki is a CLI that writes and maintains documentation for your codebase, built specifically for agents.

OpenWiki

Install

npm install -g openwiki

Quick Start

Initialize OpenWiki, configure your model and API key, then generate documentation

openwiki --init

Then to ensure your documentation stays up-to-date, add the GitHub action to your repository to automatically open a PR once a day with documentation updates: openwiki-update.yml

Copy the contents of that file into .github/workflows/openwiki-update.yml in your repository.

Usage

Start the interactive CLI:

openwiki

Start OpenWiki with an initial request:

openwiki "Please generate documentation for this repository"

Run a single command and exit:

openwiki -p "Summarize what you can do"

Initialize OpenWiki:

openwiki --init

Update existing documentation:

openwiki --update

Show help:

openwiki --help

openwiki creates initial documentation in openwiki/ when no wiki exists. If openwiki/ already exists, it refreshes that documentation from repository changes. By default, the CLI stays open after each run so you can send follow-up messages. Use -p or --print for a one-shot non-interactive run that prints the final assistant output.

openwiki will automatically append prompting to your AGENTS.md and/or CLAUDE.md files to instruct your coding agent to reference it when searching for context. If the file does not already exist in your repository, OpenWiki will create it for you.

On the first interactive run, OpenWiki will have you configure your inference provider, API key, and LLM. You will also be able to set a LangSmith API key to trace your OpenWiki runs to a LangSmith tracing project named “openwiki” (optional).

These configuration options and secrets will be saved to ~/.openwiki/.env on your local machine.

Customizing

OpenWiki supports OpenRouter, Fireworks, Baseten, OpenAI and Anthropic out of the box. By default, there are a few models pre-defined (GLM 5.2, Kimi K2.6, Sonnet 5, etc) but for each inference provider, OpenWiki will allow you to specify your own custom model ID.

If there’s an inference provider or model you’d like to see added, please open a PR!