@alex_verem: You're burning 200,000 tokens every time you ask your agent about a book you already own. Dump a 400-page technical boo…
Summary
Book-to-skill is an open-source tool that converts technical books into structured skills for AI coding agents, reducing token usage by 24x-51x by loading only the needed chapters on demand.
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Cached at: 08/06/26, 10:43 PM
You’re burning 200,000 tokens every time you ask your agent about a book you already own.
Dump a 400-page technical book into context. Your agent re-processes it on every turn. It loses details in the middle. You pay for those tokens again tomorrow.
Ask your agent without the book? It hallucinates the chapter titles.
Search the PDF? You get pages, not answers. Take notes? You get a doc you never open again.
Now meet book-to-skill.
One command. Point it at a PDF, EPUB, DOCX, or any of 10 supported formats. It extracts the book’s frameworks, decision rules, techniques, and anti-patterns into a structured skill your coding agent loads on demand.
Type /designing-data-intensive-apps replication. Your agent reads the right chapter. Answers from the actual content.
Structure the author spent years building, extracted once, loaded when needed.
Compile-time, not query time. One analysis run per book. Every future session loads ~5,000 tokens instead of 200,000. 24x to 51x fewer tokens. Measured on real books.
Cost: ~$1 per book to convert. A 371-page book costs $0.96 to convert. You never pay again.
Works across Claude Code, GitHub Copilot CLI, and Amp. Same skill format. Install once, use everywhere.
16,700 stars. MIT license. Free.
Built by Virgilio Junior, an SRE in Brazil who kept re-reading the same technical books and burning tokens every session. He built the extractor and open-sourced it.
Here’s the wild part.
Raw text in context is retrieval. A skill is reasoning. Your agent works with named frameworks and decision rules, not raw text it re-parses every turn.
Your PDFs become skills. Your skills become answers. Your answers become the expertise you already paid for.
The book on your shelf isn’t forgotten. It’s one command away from being useful again.
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