Most automation projects build an automation. This one builds a system that discovers which automations to build — by mining your own recent work — and then packages the high-confidence ones into reusable tools. It's a self-improving skill for Claude Code.

The problem: repeated manual work is invisible

You feel it but rarely measure it: the same multi-step sequence done by hand for the third time. A focused bug-fix → branch → conventional commit → PR cycle. A QA-sweep dispatch. A release deploy. Each repetition is a signal that an abstraction is missing — but nobody systematically finds those signals. They're scattered across git history, terminal sessions, and memory.

What distill-workflows does

distill-workflows is a Claude Code skill that turns that scattered signal into reusable tooling, in one pass:

1. Scan three sources of "what was done recently":
   • Git commit-shape frequency — normalized subjects, ranked.
   • Session transcripts (*.jsonl) — repeated bash command patterns and recurring user-request phrasings. What you did and what you were asked.
   • Repo memory (GPS) — lessons, decisions, and promotion candidates already flagged.
2. Cluster the raw signal into named, repeated procedures.
3. Reconcile against a persistent cross-session ledger so a pattern seen once per session still accumulates toward the bar over time.
4. Score each candidate on frequency × determinism × friction.
5. Propose a ranked table and confirm with the human before doing anything irreversible.
6. Scaffold the winners from templates into the right artifact — a skill, a subagent, or a workflow — and record the rationale back into memory.

The architecture

The diagram above maps the flow left-to-right: Signal Sources → Scanner (scan.sh) → Distill Engine → Packaging → Outputs, with a Persistent Ledger the engine reads and writes, and a dashed cross-session feedback loop that feeds each run's recorded rationale back into the next run's sources.

A few design choices worth calling out:

• Read-and-propose first, scaffold on confirmation. Nothing lands on disk without a human gate. Automation that edits your repo should ask first.
• Extend before create. If 80% of a candidate already lives in an existing skill, the engine says so instead of producing a near-duplicate.
• The ledger fixes the frequency blind spot. A workflow you do once per session looks rare inside a single run. Accumulating "seen" counts across runs is what lets genuinely recurring work eventually qualify.

It found real work — on itself

Run against its own repo, the scanner surfaced a pattern repeated 50+ times that nobody had abstracted: a single-concern Android/Kotlin fix shipped as a small PR with the same conventions every time (branch naming, conventional commit scope, base branch, size limit, no AI attribution). The engine packaged it into an android-fix-pr skill — exactly the kind of convention layer the generic commit/create-pr tools don't encode.

The higher-frequency QA-sweep pattern was also detected, but the engine correctly declined to package it: it already existed as a parameterized workflow. Knowing when not to build is half the value.

How it's built

• A SKILL.md procedure the agent follows.
• A scan.sh signal miner — jq over transcripts, git log shape analysis, gps recall, artifact inventory — emitting one structured report.
• A watchlist.md ledger for cross-session frequency.
• Artifact templates for skill / subagent / workflow.
• GPS repo memory for persisted decisions.

What's next

• Schedule it to run automatically and surface a weekly "candidate digest."
• Rank promotion candidates via the GPS MCP tool.
• Share distilled skills across repos.

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Built with Claude Code. The core idea generalizes well beyond one repo: point a discovery loop at your own work history, score what repeats, and let the high-confidence patterns become tools.