the-knowledge-guy: Turn Your Bookshelf Into a Tutor With Claude Code Skills
the-knowledge-guy is a Claude Code skill that turns your book collection into an interactive knowledge base. Built by vitalysim on GitHub, it provides eleven modes for querying, learning from, and summarizing your books — all processing stays local, then uses an LLM for synthesis.
Eleven Modes
- ask — cross-domain synthesis essay with inline citations
- walk — interactive curriculum with quizzes, resumable
- nutshell — whole-book per-chapter skim (~100 words/chapter)
- library — bookshelf overview
- comparison — one concept across multiple books (agree/extend/tension)
- cheatsheet — operational one-page reference per book
- glossary — A–Z terms, per book or cross-library
- concept-map — Tier-1 framework graph for a book
- toolkit — Tier-2 deep dive on one chapter
- ingest — hand a new PDF/EPUB to
/book-to-skill - resume — pick up an interrupted walk
The router auto-discovers installed skills — drop one in, and it's available on the next invocation. Every output also writes a self-contained HTML artifact using a polished design system built alongside the skill.
Ingestion Pipeline
The ingest side (/book-to-skill) is a separate skill implementing a 5-stage map-reduce pipeline. It takes approximately 10 minutes per 600-page book. All processing is local-then-LLM — your books stay on your disk.
Compatibility
Works natively on Claude Code, Claude Desktop, claude.ai, the Anthropic API, OpenAI Codex CLI, and GitHub Copilot. MIT licensed.
The repo is at github.com/vitalysim/the-knowledge-guy. The developer noted that the book_number canonical-labeling system was the bug that took the longest to resolve.
📖 Read the full source: r/ClaudeAI
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