# Beyond Memory: A Templated Substrate for Heterogeneous Collaborative Knowledge Work with LLM Agents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24759 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.24759/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Agent memory systems, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 1 of its 7 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 May 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Agent memory systems](https://mlsanity.com/agents/agent-memory-systems/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [HippoRAG: Neurobiologically Inspired Long-Term Memory for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14831/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Research projects, educational efforts, and adjacent knowledge work accumulate findings, decisions, and reasoning that future collaborators rarely recover. The parts most useful to that work, including dead ends and walked-back claims, are routinely excluded from publications and shared code; future researchers re-attempt the same failures because no record survives. LLM coding agents are common participants but hold no persistent memory across sessions, and retrieval-augmented generation over raw sources does not compound. The llm-wiki pattern (Karpathy, 2026; tonbi, 2026) addresses this by inserting an LLM-maintained, interlinked wiki between raw sources and the agent. We present llm-wiki-memory-template, a reusable, agent-aware instantiation, and argue it is a substrate for heterogeneous collaborative knowledge work along three axes (multi-human, multi-AI-agent, multi-domain) with each axis supported by a distinct architectural element of the template (S4). The wiki is append-only by convention, which preserves what did not work alongside what did, addressing a negative-result loss problem that publications and code-sharing structurally cannot solve. Three deployed case studies and one design report cover the axes individually: a solo research lineage that preserves abandoned iterations; a two-author project whose retroactive audit revised two prior experiments' claimed 20-of-20 coverage down to 14 and 12 evidence-based answers, then to 18 and 18 after a fix, with the failure path preserved across the artifact; an in-progress multi-agent deployment reported as a design; and a cross-domain educational variant. We name failure-path preservation, agent honesty, and appropriation as cross-cutting sociotechnical properties of the artifact, not only of its technical mechanisms.