Distillery

@norrietaylor

12 days ago

Persistent shared context for AI coding sessions — capture, search, synthesize with 18 MCP tools and ambient intelligence

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Overview

Distillery

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

Documentation · Skills · Quick Start · Roadmap · Slides

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

Distillery demo — /distill captures a decision, /pour synthesizes it

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 defaults to a hosted demo server — you can start using Distillery immediately.

Demo Server: distillery-mcp.fly.dev is for evaluation only. Do not store sensitive or confidential data.

Step 2: Switch to Local with uvx (Recommended)

For a private knowledge base, run the MCP server locally with uvx — no persistent install needed:

# Get a free API key from jina.ai, then:
export JINA_API_KEY=jina_...

Add to ~/.claude/settings.json (overrides the plugin's demo server):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "distillery": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["distillery-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "JINA_API_KEY": "${JINA_API_KEY}"
      }
    }
  }
}

Restart Claude Code and run the onboarding wizard:

/setup

See the Local Setup Guide for full configuration options, or deploy your own instance for team use.

Development

uv pip install -e ".[dev]"
# or
pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest                              # run tests
mypy --strict src/distillery/       # type check
ruff check src/ tests/              # lint

See Contributing for the full guide.

License

Apache 2.0 — see LICENSE for details.

Try in Playground

Server Config

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "distillery": {
      "url": "https://distillery-mcp.fly.dev/mcp",
      "transport": "http"
    }
  }
}

Build with ShipAny.