Rill is a personal knowledge management system powered by Claude Code. It turns fragments of thought — spoken, typed, clipped, forwarded — into structured, searchable knowledge you own.
Everything Rill produces is plain Markdown. Git is the single source of truth. Claude Code is the processor. You keep all of it on your own machine.
Status: v0.1 public preview. Expect rough edges, sharp changes, and short iteration cycles. Report issues.
Is This for Me
Rill makes the most sense if:
- You already use Claude Code daily and have a Max Plan subscription (~$20/month)
- You take notes regularly (journals, meetings, idea fragments) and want them distilled rather than just stored
- You prefer local-first, file-based tools where Git is the system of record
- You are comfortable with a CLI workflow alongside a desktop GUI
Rill is probably not for you if:
- You want cloud sync, a web-only UI, or multi-user collaboration
- You want a polished consumer product, not a v0.1 system you can hack on
- You do not want to add Anthropic to your AI vendor list
Why Rill
Most PKM tools are filing cabinets: they store what you put in, exactly how you put it in. Rill is a thinking layer on top of one: you drop in raw input (a voice memo, a meeting transcript, a clipped tweet), and Claude Code distills it into atomic notes, tasks, and entity records. The originals stay immutable; the distilled layer is evergreen.
You interact with it through natural language in Claude Code — no custom UI to learn. The files are Markdown, so every tool you already use (Obsidian, VS Code, grep) keeps working.
Screenshots
How It Works
flowchart LR
V["🎙 Voice / Text"] --> J["inbox/journal"]
P["🔌 Plugins<br/>(Gmail, Meet, Twitter…)"] --> IB["inbox/*"]
J --> Distill["/distill"]
IB --> Distill
Distill --> K["📚 knowledge/"]
Distill --> T["✓ tasks/"]
WS["🧠 workspace/<br/>(deep thinking)"] -->|"/close"| K
K -.query.-> WS
K --> Out["📰 reports/<br/>📄 pages/"]
T --> Out
Rill organizes data into layers: input (immutable, what you captured), thinking (workspaces for deep work), knowledge (evergreen distilled notes + entities), action (tasks), and output (daily briefings, newsletters, aggregated pages). Skills like /distill, /focus, and /briefing move data across the layers. See docs/architecture.md for the full flow.
Desktop App
A native macOS app ships alongside the CLI. Use the app for reading and navigation; use Claude Code in the terminal for creation and thinking.
The app and CLI read the same vault. Start with either; they stay in sync through the filesystem.
Core Skills
| Skill | What it does |
|---|
/onboarding | First-time setup and tutorial |
/morning | Daily reports: /briefing + /newsletter, run sequentially inline |
/distill | Extract knowledge, tasks, and entities from inbox entries |
/briefing | Generate today's daily note from recent activity |
/newsletter | Generate a research report based on your interests |
/pulse | Refresh your current-state snapshot (direction, open work, recent decisions) |
/retrospective | Generate a weekly retrospective across workspaces and decisions |
/focus | Start or resume a deep thinking workspace |
/close | Complete a workspace and distill insights to knowledge |
/project | Manage a project execution hub — status, next task, or an autonomous run |
/refresh-project | Recompute a project's active tasks and related workspaces |
/refresh-decisions | Recompute a project's pending human-decision digest |
/page | Create and update human-facing aggregated views |
/sync | Run plugin adapters to pull external sources |
/solve | AI-assisted execution of a task ticket |
/inspect | Audit knowledge note metadata quality |
/repair | Fix metadata issues detected by /inspect |
/maintain | Run scheduled maintenance passes |
/eval | Benchmark skill performance |
/clip-tweet | Ingest a tweet URL into the web-clips layer |
/plugin | Interactive plugin management |
Every skill is a single Markdown file — canonically skills/{name}/SKILL.md (deployed to your vault as .claude/skills/{name}/SKILL.md). Read the file to see exactly what it does — there is no hidden logic.
Quick Start
Requirements
- macOS 12+ (for the desktop app), or any OS with a terminal (for CLI only)
- Claude Code with a Max Plan subscription (~$20/month, separate from Rill)
- Git,
jq
Install
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rillmd/rill/main/install.sh | bash
Inspect the script first: install.sh on GitHub.
The installer clones Rill, creates a vault at ~/Documents/my-rill, and symlinks the rill CLI. It does not modify your shell profile; it prints the PATH line for you to add.
First run
cd ~/Documents/my-rill
claude
Then type /onboarding. This walks you through a first journal entry, your first /focus + /distill cycle, and the "ask Claude anything" muscle that you'll use daily.
Daily Usage
Rill runs inside Claude Code. Once you're in your vault with claude started, just talk to it in natural language:
"capture this thought: ideas about project architecture"
"clip https://example.com/interesting-article"
"give me today's briefing" / "what's worth reading today based on my interests?"
"help me think through the API redesign"
"pull in any new entries from my plugins and extract what's useful"
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
