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.

Use distill when the user needs a cleaner mental model of something complicated. If the real need is to generate non-obvious hypotheses, cross-domain analogies, or mechanism transfers, prefer lateral-thinking instead.

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