Skills Overview
Distillery provides 10 Claude Code slash commands organized into three categories: knowledge capture, knowledge retrieval, and ambient intelligence.
Knowledge Capture
| Skill |
Purpose |
/distill |
Capture decisions, insights, and action items from working sessions |
/bookmark |
Save URLs with auto-generated summaries |
/minutes |
Create and update structured meeting notes |
Knowledge Retrieval
| Skill |
Purpose |
/recall |
Semantic search over the knowledge base |
/pour |
Multi-entry synthesis with citations and gap analysis |
/classify |
Classify entries by type and triage the review queue |
Ambient Intelligence
| Skill |
Purpose |
/watch |
Manage monitored feed sources (GitHub, RSS) |
/radar |
Generate a digest of recent feed activity |
/tune |
Adjust feed relevance thresholds |
Onboarding
| Skill |
Purpose |
/setup |
First-time configuration wizard |
How Skills Work
Skills are defined as SKILL.md files in .claude-plugin/skills/. When you invoke a slash command, Claude Code loads the markdown and follows the instructions — no Python code is executed by the skill itself. All data operations go through the Distillery MCP server's tools.
Common Patterns
All skills share these conventions (defined in CONVENTIONS.md):
- MCP health check — skills verify the MCP server is reachable before proceeding
- Author resolution — determined from
git config user.name, then DISTILLERY_AUTHOR env var, then asks
- Project resolution — determined from
--project flag, then git rev-parse --show-toplevel, then asks
- Tag extraction — 2-5 keywords, lowercase, hyphen-separated, hierarchical (e.g.,
project/distillery/decisions)
- Error handling — display the error and stop; no retry loops
- Preview before store — all write operations show a preview and ask for confirmation