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Skill

distill

by pbakaus

AI Summary

Distill helps developers simplify complex designs by stripping away unnecessary elements to reveal core functionality and clarity. Useful for engineers and designers iterating on features or refactoring existing components.

Install

# Install all 18 skills from impeccable
mkdir -p .cursor/skills/adapt
&& curl --retry 3 --retry-delay 2 --retry-all-errors -fsSL -o .cursor/skills/adapt/SKILL.md "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pbakaus/impeccable/main/.claude/skills/adapt/SKILL.md"
&& \

Run in your IDE terminal (bash). On Windows, use Git Bash, WSL, or your IDE's built-in terminal. If curl fails with an SSL error, your network may block raw.githubusercontent.com — try using a VPN or download the files directly from the source repo.

Description

Strip designs to their essence by removing unnecessary complexity. Great design is simple, powerful, and clean.

Context Gathering (Do This First)

You cannot do a great job without having necessary context, such as target audience (critical), desired use-cases (critical), and understanding what's truly essential vs nice-to-have for this product. Attempt to gather these from the current thread or codebase. • If you don't find exact information and have to infer from existing design and functionality, you MUST STOP and STOP and call the AskUserQuestionTool to clarify. whether you got it right. • Otherwise, if you can't fully infer or your level of confidence is medium or lower, you MUST STOP and call the AskUserQuestionTool to clarify. clarifying questions first to complete your context. Do NOT proceed until you have answers. Simplifying the wrong things destroys usability.

Use frontend-design skill

Use the frontend-design skill for design principles and anti-patterns. Do NOT proceed until it has executed and you know all DO's and DON'Ts. ---

Assess Current State

Analyze what makes the design feel complex or cluttered: • Identify complexity sources: • Too many elements: Competing buttons, redundant information, visual clutter • Excessive variation: Too many colors, fonts, sizes, styles without purpose • Information overload: Everything visible at once, no progressive disclosure • Visual noise: Unnecessary borders, shadows, backgrounds, decorations • Confusing hierarchy: Unclear what matters most • Feature creep: Too many options, actions, or paths forward • Find the essence: • What's the primary user goal? (There should be ONE) • What's actually necessary vs nice-to-have? • What can be removed, hidden, or combined? • What's the 20% that delivers 80% of value? If any of these are unclear from the codebase, STOP and call the AskUserQuestionTool to clarify. CRITICAL: Simplicity is not about removing features - it's about removing obstacles between users and their goals. Every element should justify its existence.

Plan Simplification

Create a ruthless editing strategy: • Core purpose: What's the ONE thing this should accomplish? • Essential elements: What's truly necessary to achieve that purpose? • Progressive disclosure: What can be hidden until needed? • Consolidation opportunities: What can be combined or integrated? IMPORTANT: Simplification is hard. It requires saying no to good ideas to make room for great execution. Be ruthless.

Quality Score

C

Acceptable

72/100

Standard Compliance45
Documentation Quality65
Usefulness70
Maintenance Signal100
Community Signal100
Scored Today

GitHub Signals

Stars8.4k
Forks328
Issues5
UpdatedToday
View on GitHub

Trust & Transparency

Open Source — Apache-2.0

Source code publicly auditable

Verified Open Source

Hosted on GitHub — publicly auditable

Actively Maintained

Last commit Today

8.4k stars — Strong Community

328 forks

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Works With

Claude Code