Distill

Distill is a desktop app for working with AI agents, built with Tauri 2 and React 19. A built-in Rust ACP host (src-tauri/src/services/agent_host/) spawns the agent harnesses on demand and keeps every session on your machine:

• Claude Code and Codex, through the ACP bridges pinned in acp-tools.lock.json and installed at runtime onto a managed Node runtime;
• GitHub Copilot, Grok and Amp, through their own CLIs when you have them installed.

On top of plain chats it has projects, agents and skills, a conductor that plans larger requests as waves of executor sessions and reviews their reports (src/features/conductor/, LAWS/WAVES.md), and memory that carries short facts into later prompts, globally or per project (src/features/memory/, LAWS/MEMORY.md). Agents drive the visible app through the bundled distillctl CLI.

Distill runs on Windows only. It is a personal fork of block/berd by Ivan Lezhnin; the original work is Block's, and the project stays under the Apache 2.0 LICENSE.

Setup on Windows

Every recipe below is a thin wrapper around a script in scripts\windows\. When just is not on PATH, run the script from the repository root with powershell.exe -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File <script>.

Step	just	Script
Check prerequisites	just bootstrap-windows	scripts\windows\Bootstrap-Windows.ps1
Install what is missing with WinGet	just bootstrap-windows install	scripts\windows\Bootstrap-Windows.ps1 -Mode install
Verify the machine	just doctor-windows	scripts\windows\Doctor-Windows.ps1
Install pnpm dependencies and git hooks	just setup-windows	scripts\windows\Setup-Windows.ps1
Run the dev app	just dev-windows	scripts\windows\Dev-Windows.ps1

For example, without just:

powershell.exe -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File scripts\windows\Bootstrap-Windows.ps1 -Mode install
powershell.exe -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File scripts\windows\Setup-Windows.ps1
powershell.exe -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File scripts\windows\Dev-Windows.ps1

Bootstrap installs or checks Git, Visual Studio Build Tools (MSVC), the WebView2 Runtime, the Rust toolchain from rust-toolchain.toml, fnm with Node and pnpm, CMake, just and Lefthook; winget install --id Casey.Just -e gets just itself. Open a new PowerShell when freshly installed tools are not on PATH.

dev-windows builds distillctl.exe and distill-monitor.exe, starts Vite and the Tauri dev app, and points the app at this repository's distro\ for bundled agents and skills. scripts\windows\Launch-Distill.ps1 -InstallShortcut creates a desktop shortcut that launches the dev app from Explorer.

The Rust build cache lives in src-tauri\target and grows to tens of GB; set DISTILL_TAURI_CARGO_TARGET_DIR to move it. More detail, cleanup and troubleshooting: docs/windows-onboarding.md.

Bundling

Output	just	Script
NSIS installer	just bundle	scripts\windows\Bundle-Windows.ps1
MSI installer	just bundle-windows msi	scripts\windows\Bundle-Windows.ps1 -Bundle msi
NSIS installer with WebView devtools	just bundle-debug	scripts\windows\Bundle-Windows.ps1 -Debug

The script installs locked dependencies, stages distillctl and distill-monitor as externalBin sidecars, runs tauri build for x86_64-pc-windows-msvc, and prints the installer path under <target>\x86_64-pc-windows-msvc\release\bundle\. Installers are unsigned. The harness bridges are not bundled; the app installs them at runtime.

Useful commands

• just check — design-system, distillctl contract, formatting, lint, i18n and TypeScript checks
• just test — the Vitest suite (pnpm test) plus the hook launcher tests
• just fmt — format frontend and Rust files
• just tauri-check / just clippy — Rust check and lint with sidecars disabled
• just ci — the local gate: frontend checks, Rust format, check, tests and clippy, unit and relay tests, frontend build
• just ci-windows — Windows-native Rust tests for the managed Node runtime and bridges (scripts\windows\CI-Windows.ps1)
• just test-windows-dev — self-tests for the Windows scripts (scripts\windows\Test-WindowsDev.ps1)
• just prune-build-cache — reclaim build-cache disk; a dry run unless given -Remove (scripts\windows\Prune-BuildCache-Windows.ps1)
• just cleanup-windows — dry-run or remove local setup state (scripts\windows\Cleanup-Windows.ps1)
• just new-command <noun> <verb> — scaffold a distillctl command
• just bump-node-runtime <version> — re-pin the managed Node runtime

The app log is %LOCALAPPDATA%\com.levocat.distill\logs\distill.log; each harness's stderr lands there prefixed with its id, such as [claude-acp]. A dev build uses com.levocat.distill.dev. Chats, projects and installed bridges are under the same name in %APPDATA%. Folders left by a build that still ran as xyz.block.berd are renamed on the first start.

AGENTS.md describes the layout and conventions, LAWS/ the product rules the code is held to, and docs/app-e2e.md how to drive the running app from outside.