Aptitude

Generate AI skills from artifacts.

Aptitude reads PDFs, EPUBs, web pages, and GitHub repositories, and turns them — plus a one-line prompt — into a reusable skill: a SKILL.md with its supporting files, or the same content repackaged for another runtime. The artifacts say what is true, the prompt says what is relevant.

Install

pip install -e ".[dev]"

That installs the CLI in editable mode with the test dependencies; afterwards you can run aptitude ... or python -m aptitude .... To skip the setup, use the launchers instead — start.sh (Linux/macOS) and start.ps1 (Windows) create a local virtual environment on first run, install Aptitude into it, and forward every argument straight to the CLI.

./start.sh providers          # Linux / macOS
.\start.ps1 providers         # Windows (PowerShell)

Example

aptitude create \
  -p "Onboard a new engineer to this HTTP library: what it does, how it is laid out, and where to start reading" \
  -i psf/requests \
  --provider ollama --model mistral-small:latest

The model names the skill, and the directory is named after it. This is the tree that run produced:

out/
└── onboard-new-engineer-to-requests-library/
    ├── SKILL.md                     # YAML frontmatter (name, description) then the body
    └── references/
        └── source-material.md       # the whole corpus distilled into one reference file

$ aptitude validate ./out/onboard-new-engineer-to-requests-library
valid

That is the default format. The other file-writing formats write into the same flat out/<skill-name>/ directory too, except zip, whose archive lands beside it as out/<skill-name>.zip. --format all runs each one in turn — Anatomy of a Generated Skill walks through a real --format all run file by file, including the format that writes nothing.

Providers

Choose one with --provider, APTITUDE_PROVIDER, or provider in aptitude.toml. With none of those set, Aptitude uses claude when ANTHROPIC_API_KEY is present and ollama otherwise. Full precedence rules, per-command options, and the two synthesis strategies are in docs/product/features.md.

Output formats

Select with --format (default claude-skill), comma-separated for several, or --format all for every one. Per-format detail is in docs/product/features.md.

Documentation

Start at docs/index.md, or go straight to a page:

aptitude --help and aptitude COMMAND --help cover the same surface from the terminal.