distillery

Distillery

Team Knowledge, Distilled
Capture, classify, connect, and surface team knowledge through conversational commands.

Documentation · Skills · Quick Start · Roadmap · Slides

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What is Distillery?

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.

Distillery captures the highest-value transformation — from noise to signal — and makes it a tool the whole team can use.

Full documentation: norrietaylor.github.io/distillery

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 relevance 0.4
/digest	Team activity summary from internal entries	/digest --days 7 --project myapp
/gh-sync	Sync GitHub issues/PRs into the knowledge base	/gh-sync owner/repo --issues
/investigate	Deep context builder with relationship traversal	/investigate distributed caching
/briefing	Team knowledge dashboard with metrics	/briefing --days 7
/setup	Onboarding wizard for MCP connectivity and config	/setup

Quick Start

Step 1: Install the Plugin

claude plugin marketplace add norrietaylor/distillery
claude plugin install distillery

This installs all 14 skills. The plugin does not configure an MCP server automatically — run /setup (below) to add one. The recommended setup runs locally via uvx --from 'distillery-mcp[fastembed]>=0.6.0' distillery-mcp — a private, self-contained knowledge base on your machine, with on-device fastembed embeddings (no API key required). Requires Python 3.11+ and uv (install: curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh).

Step 2 (Optional): Use Jina or OpenAI Instead

The default fastembed provider runs offline with no API key. If you'd rather use a hosted embedding service, set DISTILLERY_EMBEDDING_PROVIDER and provide the matching API key:

# Jina (free tier at jina.ai)
export DISTILLERY_EMBEDDING_PROVIDER=jina
export JINA_API_KEY=jina_...