Distillery¶

Team Knowledge, Distilled

Distillery is a team knowledge base accessed through Claude Code skills. It refines raw information from working sessions, meetings, bookmarks, and conversations into concentrated, searchable knowledge — stored as vector embeddings in DuckDB and retrieved through natural language.

Runs locally over stdio or as a hosted HTTP service with GitHub OAuth for team access.

Who is Distillery for?¶

Developers and teams who use Claude Code and want to capture, organize, and retrieve knowledge without leaving their workflow.
Team leads and operators who want a shared knowledge base their team can access through a hosted MCP server with GitHub authentication.
Anyone who wants to stop losing context — capture decisions, insights, and references as they happen, and retrieve them through natural language when you need them.

Skills¶

Distillery provides 14 Claude Code slash commands:

Skill	Purpose	Example
`/distill`	Capture session knowledge with dedup detection	`/distill "We decided to use DuckDB for local storage"`
`/recall`	Semantic search with provenance	`/recall distributed caching strategies`
`/pour`	Multi-entry synthesis with citations	`/pour how does our auth system work?`
`/bookmark`	Store URLs with auto-generated summaries	`/bookmark https://example.com/article #caching`
`/minutes`	Meeting notes with append updates	`/minutes --update standup-2026-03-22`
`/classify`	Classify entries and triage review queue	`/classify --inbox`
`/watch`	Manage monitored feed sources	`/watch add github:duckdb/duckdb`
`/radar`	Ambient feed digest with source suggestions	`/radar --days 7`
`/tune`	Adjust feed relevance thresholds	`/tune --digest 0.40`
`/setup`	Onboarding wizard for MCP connectivity and config	`/setup`
`/digest`	Team activity summary from internal entries	`/digest --days 7`
`/gh-sync`	Sync GitHub issues/PRs into the knowledge base	`/gh-sync owner/repo`
`/investigate`	Deep context builder with relationship traversal	`/investigate authentication flow`
`/briefing`	Knowledge dashboard (solo and team mode)	`/briefing --project distillery`

Quick Start¶

Step 1: Install the Plugin¶

claude plugin marketplace add norrietaylor/distillery
claude plugin install distillery

This installs all 14 skills and configures the MCP server to run locally via uvx distillery-mcp — a private, self-contained knowledge base on your machine. Requires Python 3.11+ and uv.

Install uv

curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

Step 2: Set Your Embedding API Key (Optional but Recommended)¶

export JINA_API_KEY=jina_...   # free at jina.ai

uvx inherits this from your shell environment. Without a key, Distillery falls back to a stub embedding provider (search quality degraded).

Restart Claude Code and run /setup to complete onboarding.

Try the Hosted Demo (Opt-In)¶

Want to evaluate without installing locally? Override the plugin default with the hosted demo at distillery-mcp.fly.dev:

claude mcp add distillery --scope user --transport http --url https://distillery-mcp.fly.dev/mcp

Demo Server

distillery-mcp.fly.dev is a demo server for evaluation only. Do not store sensitive or confidential data.

See Local Setup for full configuration (embedding providers, cloud storage, etc.) or deploy your own instance for team use.

License¶

Apache 2.0 — see LICENSE for details.