Book To Skill

# Book-to-Skill Converter

Transform written knowledge into actionable agent skills by extracting structure — not producing summaries.

## Philosophy

Books contain crystallized expertise: frameworks, principles, and techniques that took years to develop. This skill extracts that knowledge into a format Amp, Claude Code, or another compatible agent can leverage repeatedly.

**Extract structure, not summaries.** A skill isn't a book report. It's a toolkit of:
- Named frameworks (mental models with clear application)
- Actionable principles (rules that guide decisions)
- Techniques (step-by-step methods)
- Anti-patterns (what to avoid and why)
- Voice calibration (how the author thinks and communicates)

**Preserve the author's precision.** Frameworks often have specific names for reasons. "The 5 Whys" isn't interchangeable with "ask why multiple times." Capture the exact formulation.

**Layer depth appropriately.** Simple books → simple skills. Complex books with 10+ frameworks → skills with reference files and on-demand chapters.

---

## Modes of Operation

Four paths available. Route based on what the user asks:

### 1. Full Conversion (Default)
**Trigger:** User provides one or more document/directory/glob paths without special instructions
**Action:** Run all steps below (Steps 0–9)
**Output:** Complete skill with SKILL.md, chapters/, glossary, patterns, cheatsheet

### 2. Analyze Only
**Trigger:** User says "analyze", "just extract", or "I want to review before generating"
**Action:** Run Steps 0–3, then produce a structured extraction report (frameworks, principles, techniques found). Stop — do NOT generate skill files.
**Output:** Analysis report for user review

### 3. Generate from Prior Analysis
**Trigger:** User has existing analysis notes or previously ran analyze-only
**Action:** Skip Steps 0–3, use the provided analysis as input, run Steps 4–9
**Output:** Skill files from the provided analysis

### 4. Update / Fold-in (Existing Skill)
**Trigger:** User provides one or more new source paths and indicates they want to update an existing skill (either by pointing to the existing skill folder, providing a skill slug that already exists in `SKILLS_HOME`, or explicitly requesting an update).
**Action:** Run Step 0 (out-of-scope check), Step 1 (validate inputs), Step 1.5 (identify book type), and Step 2 (extract new files). Then skip to Step 5 (identify/detect existing skill path) and run the **Update / Fold-in Workflow** to merge the new content into the existing skill files.
**Output:** Updated existing skill with new/revised chapter summaries and merged indexes/glossaries.

---

## Skill Locations

This converter can run from multiple skill systems. When looking for this converter's helper script or writing the generated book skill, prefer these locations in order:

1. Claude Code skills: `~/.claude/skills/`
2. Amp project-local skills: `.agents/skills/`
3. Amp global skills: `~/.config/agents/skills/`
4. Amp legacy global skills: `~/.config/amp/skills/`

Generated skills should default to `~/.claude/skills/` for Claude Code unless the user asks for Amp project-local or Amp global output.

---

## Step 0 — Out-of-scope check

If no arguments are provided, stop and respond:
> "book-to-skill requires a su