Distill

Compress a complex system into the smallest useful set of abstractions that still reconstructs its behavior.

Read references/input-strategies.md when starting on a codebase, research paper, transcript, or article — it has input-type-specific starting heuristics.

Core Concepts

Primitives: the irreducible building blocks that can't be decomposed further without losing essential behavior. A good primitive set is:

• Complete — you can reconstruct the full system's behavior from just these pieces
• Orthogonal — each primitive captures something the others don't
• Minimal — removing any one primitive loses something essential
• Sized independently — don't force primitives to the same level of abstraction when one is genuinely bigger than the others
• Use as many primitives as reconstruction requires; treat a large set as a signal to try another compression pass, not an automatic failure.