distil-labs/distil-cli-skill

An Agent Skill for building task-specific small language models on the distil labs
platform: from raw data or production traces, through teacher evaluation and synthetic data
generation, to a finetuned, evaluated, deployable student model.
Everything runs on the distil labs platform through the distil CLI, or through the REST API
from Python when you prefer it. The only prerequisite is an account. The API backend also needs
pip install requests pyyaml, and takes its access tokens from distil access-token.
The skill works with every coding agent that reads the Agent Skills format, including Claude Code,
Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot and OpenCode.
Installation
With the distil CLI
distil skill install puts the skill in ~/.agents/skills, the shared directory that Codex,
Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, Cline and many other agents read. It also links the
skill into Claude Code. Run it again to update the skill. distil skill uninstall removes it. The command needs git. It does not
need Node.
With the skills CLI
If you have Node, skills installs the skill without the
distil CLI:
Use this route for an agent that distil skill install does not cover, with --agent .
Prerequisites
The skill runs every stage through the distil CLI, installed above. Sign in with
distil auth, or distil signup without an account; the skill does this itself at the start of
a project if you skip it. On Windows, run the CLI inside WSL.
Supported Task Types
| Task Type | Use Case | Example |
|-----------|----------|---------|
| Question Answering | Extract answers from documents | Invoice parsing, contract analysis, ticket extraction |
| Classification | Categorize text into fixed classes | Intent detection, sentiment analysis, ticket triage |
| Chat Completion | Conversational turns with text, tool calls, or both | Support chatbots, API routing, chatbot actions |
| Agentic Chat Completion | Tool-calling loops where tool results feed back into the answer | DevOps assistants, file system assistants, database interfaces |
Layout
SKILL.md is the entry point. stages/ holds one unit of pipeline work each, workflows/ the
two workflows (the build loop and the improvement loop), and references/ the shared knowledge,
with every distil command in references/execution/cli.md and every REST API request in
references/execution/backend-api.md. Swapping the CLI for the REST API changes the commands and
nothing else.
Quick Start
Once the skill is installed, ask your agent to build you a model: