distill

/distill

Force a distillation pass now. The daemon's background distill cycles run on its own clock; /distill is the explicit user-triggered pass.

Mental model

Distillation is four operations bundled into one flow:

• emerge — cluster new memories into new pages
• absorb — assign orphan memories to existing pages, propose new pages from topics that 2+ existing pages link to but no page is named for
• refresh — regenerate stale pages from their source memories (only when the user has not edited the page; pages you have touched stay locked)
• merge — combine duplicate pages flagged by the daemon's global review

The default flow runs all four. The rebuild verb is a destructive opt-in that overrides the lock on a single page.

Single flow

One POST to the daemon. Response splits into:

• pages_created / created_ids: pages the daemon synthesized itself (only when daemon has an LLM).
• pending: clusters the daemon couldn't finish. The agent synthesizes each in this session and POSTs them back to /api/pages.

Trigger timing is the only thing that differs between background distill cycles and this skill. Code path is the same; daemon hands back clusters when it can't synthesize; whoever called fills in the rest.

Resolve the active space

The /distill skill accepts one optional inline token of the form space:<name> anywhere in the argument string. The bundled resolver strips it and returns the rest as the target. It prints the resolved Space line itself:

raw_args="<the full argument string passed to /distill>"
# The resolver ships inside the installed plugin; the relative path only
# exists in a wenlan checkout.
resolver="$(find "$HOME/.codex/plugins/cache" -path '*/wenlan/*/bin/resolve-space.sh' 2>/dev/null | head -1)"
resolved="$("${resolver:-plugin-codex/bin/resolve-space.sh}" --cwd "$PWD" --args "$raw_args")"
space="$(printf '%s\n' "$resolved" | cut -f1)"
source_layer="$(printf '%s\n' "$resolved" | cut -f2)"
target="$(printf '%s\n' "$resolved" | cut -f3-)"