Rules Distill

Scans your installed Claude skills to find principles that show up in multiple places, then promotes them into your rules files. The workflow is deterministic collection (bash scripts inventory skills and rules) followed by LLM judgment (batched analysis with full context, no grep filtering). It won't auto-edit anything. Instead, it presents candidates with verdicts like "append to security.md" or "revise testing.md" and waits for you to approve, modify, or skip. Run this monthly or after a skill stocktake when you notice repeated patterns that should graduate from individual skills into system-wide rules. The cross-batch merge step is clever: it rechecks the "appears in 2+ skills" requirement across all batches combined, not just within each cluster.

skills.sh installs: 5.4K
GitHub stars: 300.3K
last updated: Aug 21, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add affaan-m/ecc --skill rules-distill --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

Rules Distill

Scan installed skills, extract cross-cutting principles that appear in multiple skills, and distill them into rules — appending to existing rule files, revising outdated content, or creating new rule files.

Applies the "deterministic collection + LLM judgment" principle: scripts collect facts exhaustively, then an LLM cross-reads the full context and produces verdicts.

When to Use

Periodic rules maintenance (monthly or after installing new skills)
After a skill-stocktake reveals patterns that should be rules
When rules feel incomplete relative to the skills being used

How It Works

The rules distillation process follows three phases:

Phase 1: Inventory (Deterministic Collection)

1a. Collect skill inventory

bash ~/.claude/skills/rules-distill/scripts/scan-skills.sh

1b. Collect rules index

bash ~/.claude/skills/rules-distill/scripts/scan-rules.sh

1c. Present to user

Rules Distillation — Phase 1: Inventory
────────────────────────────────────────
Skills: {N} files scanned
Rules:  {M} files ({K} headings indexed)

Proceeding to cross-read analysis...

SKILL.md on GitHub