---
url: "https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1vfvyay/i_let_claude_code_distill_a_skill_out_of_my_old/"
title: I let Claude Code distill a skill out of my old sessions instead of writing one by hand
source_kind: reddit
subreddit: ClaudeAI
author: CuriousOrdinary3324
score: 34
captured: "2026-08-06T05:55:37+00:00"
comment_tree: false
topics: [ai-tools]
summary: A user describes using Claude Code to auto-generate a deploy-flow skill from past sessions, noting cross-tool adoption but questioning the reliability of distilled skills.
status: ok
---

I had Claude Code read back over my old sessions for one repo and write out the deploy flow as a skill. I'd been meaning to document that flow properly for months and never did. Now it comes back at the start of a session the way a preference does.
Full disclosure, I work on memU, which is what's doing the remembering here. It's free and open source, Apache-2.0.
The install is the bit I keep mentioning to people. There's no setup script to run. You point the agent at a SKILL.md and it works out what environment it's sitting in and does the rest.
What it stores is plain markdown. I can open the files, fix a line that's gone out of date, delete something I don't want it carrying around. That ended up mattering more than I expected, because my CLAUDE.md had quietly filled up with things that used to be true and I'd stopped reading it closely enough to notice.
The bit I didn't plan for: I use Codex for some work, and it picks up conventions Claude Code wrote down. I stopped keeping two sets of notes.
What I'm unsure about is the distilling itself. A skill I write by hand is deliberate, I pick what goes in. A skill pulled out of a session log contains what I actually did that day, wrong turns included, and reading it back I can't always tell which version was the good one. Right now I read them and delete lines, which obviously won't scale.
If you've been generating skills rather than writing them, how do you keep the generated ones honest?