Distill

A skill for iteratively compressing complex systems down to their essential primitives — the minimal set of abstractions that captures the full behavioral essence while discarding accidental complexity.

Think of it like Andrej Karpathy reducing an automated research system to three files (train.py, prepare.py, program.md). The goal is not summarization — it's re-expression in minimal form.

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