@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…

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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.

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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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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virgiliojr94/book-to-skill

GitHub Trending (daily)

book-to-skill is a tool that converts technical books, document folders, or collections of sources into structured agent skill files for use with GitHub Copilot CLI, Amp, and Claude Code, reducing token usage by 24x-51x compared to dumping full book text into context.

@gaoren7716: Of the 200 tech books you've read, how many chapters do you remember after 3 months? PDFs sit on your hard drive, unopened. Notes span 200 lines, never revisited. Ask an Agent, and it either hallucinates or says "I don't know this book." 3 ways to "use" a book: · Stuff it into Claude's context:…

X AI KOLs Timeline

book-to-skill is an open-source tool that transforms technical books, documents, or collections into structured Agent skills. It supports on-demand chapter loading via GitHub Copilot CLI, Amp, and Claude Code, solving knowledge forgetting and hallucination issues.

@sitinme: Not just "have AI summarize a book", but go further: turning a book or a document package into a Skill that an AI Agent can repeatedly call. This idea is worth discussing. Previously, after buying and reading a book, when I later wanted to find a certain knowledge point, I couldn't find it after flipping through for a long time; asking AI might make things up; throwing the entire PD…

X AI KOLs Timeline

Introduces a tool called book-to-skill that converts books or document packages into AI Agent callable Skills. It supports PDF and other formats, generates SKILL.md and chapter indexes, avoiding loading the full context at once.