distill

distill is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from jenningsallen-art/second-brain-os. It costs 103 tokens per session (1,977 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A writing skill that turns rough notes or unstructured thinking into finished documents such as memos, emails, chat messages, and internal position papers.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps draft a deliverable from notes, turn a discussion into prose, and prepare workplace writing in the user's preferred style when those rules are available.
Why use it?
It removes the need to organize and polish scattered ideas manually, while keeping the main argument clearer than a simple outline.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit It helps draft a deliverable from notes, turn a discussion into prose, and prepare workplace writing in the user's preferred style when those rules are available.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/jenningsallen-art/second-brain-os/distill
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add jenningsallen-art/second-brain-os --skill distill
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jenningsallen-art/second-brain-os

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for distill

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jenningsallen-art/second-brain-os/distill/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/jenningsallen-art/second-brain-os/distill)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jenningsallen-art/second-brain-os/distill"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jenningsallen-art/second-brain-os/distill/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for distill

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jenningsallen-art/second-brain-os/distill"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jenningsallen-art/second-brain-os/distill.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 103 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,977 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00103 $0.01977
Opus 5 $0.00051 $0.00988
Sonnet 5 $0.00021 $0.00395
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00198

Measured 11d ago against content hash 81e1bd12d25b, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

distill scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 11d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/distill/SKILL.md · 203 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 203 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Distill

Convert the user's thinking into polished written output. The motion is always the same: raw input goes in, argument-in-prose comes out. Structure is the skeleton — invisible in the output, doing the work underneath.

Read Memory.md before drafting. Its Writing Rules and How I Work sections are the user's own style constraints, and they are hard rules, not suggestions. If the user has not personalized them yet, fall back to the defaults in Step 4 and say which you used.


The Core Problem This Skill Solves

AI defaults to surfacing the organizing framework as the communication vehicle. "Three pillars of X." "Four categories of Y." "The framework has five components." The framework becomes memorable; the message becomes forgettable.

People think in outlines. Outlines are the right input mode — they organize thinking. This skill translates outlines into argument, not into listicles. The reader should be able to quote the main idea, not name the structure.

The test: after reading the output, can the reader describe it without naming a framework or category? If they say "it's about the three pillars of the data strategy" — the draft failed. If they say "it's about why the data team has to own definitions, not just dashboards" — it worked.

This is the whole reason the skill exists. Everything below serves it.


Output Formats

Format When Structure visible? Length
Memo Audience-facing argument: leadership, cross-functional No 300-600 words
Message Email or chat to a specific person No As short as possible
Position Internal only — working out a theory, stance, or framing Minimal Open-ended, preserve uncertainty
Brief Reference or background doc Yes (headers OK) As needed

Step 1: Take the raw input

Accept any state:

  • An outline or bullet list
  • Output from a thinking-partner session
  • A half-thought: "I want to say something about X"
  • A clear brief: "write a memo to the CFO about the vendor renewal"
  • An existing draft that needs rework

Read the full file on GitHub · 203 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 11d ago First seen · 203 lines · 103 tokens per session scan A 81e1bd12d25b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

distill is a skill published in the GitHub repository jenningsallen-art/second-brain-os (2 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 103 tokens to every session and 1,977 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

systematic-debugging

Use when encountering any bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior, before proposing fixes.

obra/superpowers · 21 tokens

local-ai-agents

Build local-first AI agents that run entirely on a developer workstation with Microsoft Foundry Local and Qwen function-calling models. Covers Small Language Models (SLMs), the OpenAI-compatible local endpoint, sandboxed local tools, local RAG with Chroma, local MCP servers, hybrid cloud/local routing, and the…

microsoft/ai-agents-for-beginners · 200 tokens

next-cache-components-adoption

Turn on Cache Components in a Next.js app and resolve the blocking routes it surfaces. Use when the user wants to enable, adopt, or migrate to Cache Components, flip the cacheComponents flag, work through a flood of blocking-prerender / instant validation errors, run the cache-components-instant-false codemod, or…

vercel/next.js · 95 tokens

insight-error-page

Write or audit an insight-kind error page for the Next.js dev overlay. Use when creating a new errors/ .mdx page, auditing an existing one, or checking that a page matches the framework fix cards. Covers page structure, title alignment, FixCard cards with Copy prompt button, code snippets, terminology verification…

vercel/next.js · 83 tokens

next-cache-components-optimizer

Drive a Next.js route to instant navigation by setting up an agentic loop, under Cache Components / PPR, on initial load (hard navigation) and client-side navigation (soft navigation). Encode the goal as a failing @next/playwright instant() e2e and work it to green, one verified route at a time; the shipped test then…

vercel/next.js · 170 tokens

next-partial-prefetching-adoption

Turn on Partial Prefetching in a Next.js app and work through the insights it surfaces. Use when the user wants to enable or adopt Partial Prefetching, flip the partialPrefetching flag, opt routes in with export const prefetch = 'partial', audit Link prefetch={true} behavior, preserve existing prefetched UI with…

vercel/next.js · 103 tokens