moonshine

moonshine

A skill for distilling interactive technical explanations from AI generated complexity.

AI tools generate complexity faster than people can consume it. Inspired by Distill.pub, moonshine helps apply distillation to the flood of technical output, turning complex ideas into explorable, visual, interactive articles.

> /shine how gradient descent finds minima
What is the key insight you want the reader to walk away with?

Install

Claude Code (marketplace):

# Add the marketplace and install both skills
/plugin marketplace add enjalot/moonshine
/plugin install moonshine@moonshine-marketplace
/plugin install d3-power-tools@moonshine-marketplace

Manual install:

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/enjalot/moonshine.git /tmp/moonshine
cp -r /tmp/moonshine/plugins/moonshine ~/.claude/skills/moonshine
rm -rf /tmp/moonshine

Usage

Run /shine to start a new explanation. Moonshine will ask you questions about the concept, audience, and key insight before writing any code.

/shine                              # start from scratch
/shine fourier transforms           # start with a topic

What It Does

The /shine command guides you through:

1. Story discovery Clarify the concept, audience, key insight, and progression of understanding
2. Interaction design Decide where static prose, interactive explorations, linked views, and scroll-driven narrative serve the explanation best
3. Project scaffolding Generate a complete React 18 + Vite + D3 + TypeScript project
4. Iterative building Start with prose and static figures, add interaction only where it genuinely helps

Moonshine uses d3-power-tools for visualization, a collection of specialized D3 skills covering linked views, brushing, force layouts, cartography, and more. Both are available from the same marketplace.

Project Structure

plugins/
└── moonshine/
    ├── SKILL.md          skill workflow and design principles
    ├── RESEARCH.md       background research and inspiration catalog
    └── commands/
        └── shine.md      /shine command definition

Inspirations

• Distill.pub, "Research Debt" — Why distillation matters
• Mike Bostock — D3.js and interactive articles
• Bret Victor — Explorable explanations
• Nicky Case — Playful interactive explanations
• Bartosz Ciechanowski — Long-form interactive explanations
• The Pudding — Data-driven visual essays

License

MIT