TMSH LLM Wiki Brain
April 15, 2026
LLMs are confident. That’s the problem.
Ask any LLM for TMSH syntax and you’ll get an answer. It will sound authoritative. It will be wrong. TMSH is purpose-built, highly structured, and full of nuances that general training data doesn’t capture well. Partition scoping changes behavior in ways that aren’t obvious. list vs show have distinct semantic differences that matter. modify list replacement behavior can silently wipe configuration. Flag combinations, module hierarchies, and object paths have exact syntax that training data garbles.
Rather than accept hallucinated TMSH syntax, I built a knowledge base that forces the LLM to consult vetted source material before answering.
The Concept
The TMSH LLM Wiki Brain is a locally-hosted, compounding knowledge base for F5 BIG-IP’s Traffic Management Shell. It’s stored as an Obsidian vault of interlinked Markdown files, and it’s based on Andrej Karpathy’s “LLM Wiki” pattern — feed a curated knowledge base into a session so answers are grounded in reality, not probability.
The wiki enforces strict reading discipline:
- Start at index.md — the navigation layer, always free
- Read at most 5 content pages per question — if more are needed, the agent stops and asks for permission
- Fallback is mandatory silence — if the wiki has no coverage, the agent states “The wiki does not currently cover [topic]” and suggests what source could fill the gap. It does not answer from training data as a substitute
The entire point is to prevent training-data guessing. Falling back silently would defeat the purpose.
What’s In It
The initial ingest came from two authoritative sources:
- F5 KB K13225 Cheatsheet — established the
listvsshowsemantic distinction as a foundational concept - BIG-IP TMSH Reference Guide v17.0.0 — the 1,843-page authoritative F5 document. Full ingest created 47 pages: 27 commands, 5 modules, 9 objects, 4 concepts, 1 pattern, 2 source summaries, 1 overview, and 1 index
The vault structure separates concerns cleanly: raw/ for immutable source documents, wiki/ for all generated content (commands, modules, objects, concepts, patterns), with every page following a consistent schema of YAML frontmatter, Obsidian wikilinks, callouts, and code blocks tagged with tmsh language.
Why It Matters
This was the proof of concept. The pattern worked so well for a static reference that it directly led to the QKView LLM Wiki Brain — which evolved the concept from “look up syntax” to “walk a procedure against live data and get smarter after every engagement.”
The TMSH Wiki now serves as the gold-standard CLAUDE.md template for every other wiki brain in the system.
See the Full Project
This post is an introduction. The complete project page has the full architecture, ingest sources, current state, access rules, and enhancement opportunities:
Reference: Andrej Karpathy’s LLM Wiki concept