Distill
Extract the essential ideas or lessons from detailed material and express them clearly and concisely.
Useful for turning a long agent session into a reusable skill, workflow, or guide.
“Distill our back-and-forth into a reusable skill. Incorporate the final workflow, corrections, and lessons learned; replace superseded instructions and preserve important caveats.”
A closer look
Summarize asks for a shorter account of the main points. Distill emphasizes extracting the essence: the principles, lessons, or instructions worth carrying forward. The meanings overlap; a well-specified summary can do the same work. Distill is especially useful when you want reusable guidance from a long exchange. After iterating with an agent, ask it to consolidate the final working steps, incorporate your corrections, and turn lessons from failed attempts into cautions or checks. A recap might say, 'We tried three export methods; the third worked.' A distilled workflow would explain how to use the successful method and which discovered constraints to check. Keep unresolved questions visible and distinguish a one-off workaround from a general rule. Name the artifact and its purpose: a skill for future agents, a team workflow, or documentation for a new user. The word alone does not specify what to preserve.
Put it to work
“Distill this debugging session into troubleshooting documentation: include the diagnostic steps that worked, misleading clues to avoid, and the conditions under which the fix applies.”
“Distill our design discussion into a brief for the next agent, incorporating the final decisions, their reasons, and the constraints we discovered. Flag unresolved choices.”
“Distill these interview notes into the main user needs for our planning meeting. Support each need with evidence and preserve meaningful disagreements.”
A useful distinction
Distill is useful when the emphasis is extracting essential lessons or guidance; summarize is sufficient when you want a concise overview. Neither guarantees a particular output. Specify the purpose and what must survive compression, including exceptions and uncertainty.