moonshine

moonshine

Claude Code and Codex support for distilling interactive technical explanations from AI generated complexity.

🌕 See examples at enjalot.github.io/moonshine

Source-backed still examples: The Still: Moonshine's Harness (source) and A Map of What Children Learn (source).

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.

Moonshine starts with story discovery — concept, audience, the one insight the reader should walk away with — before it writes any code, and renders the article on one of two substrates:

• still (/moonshine:still) — a Vite + React + Velite project where prose lives in pristine markdown and figures are React components. This is the substrate with the authoring loop (below) and the default for anything that will keep being edited.
• shine (/moonshine:shine) — a single self-contained HTML file with vanilla JS and D3. No build tools; one file you can email or host anywhere.

# Claude Code
/moonshine:still how gradient descent finds minima

# Codex
$still how gradient descent finds minima

The authoring loop (still)

While npm run dev runs, the rendered article is itself the editing surface, for both the author and the agent:

• Edit prose in place. Cmd/Ctrl+click any block to edit its raw markdown in the page; saves splice back into the .md by source offset.
• Tune figures with knobs. Cmd/Ctrl+click a figure to open a panel generated from its DEFAULTS; "Save to markdown" writes the tweaked values into the directive's attributes.
• Reorder sections. Cmd/Ctrl+drag any block (or use ↑/↓ in the editor) to move it; the markdown is rewritten.
• Arrange diagrams. Node-link figures built on DiagramFigure (React Flow) get an author-owned layout: drag nodes, frame the viewport, save. Regenerating the diagram's code never clobbers the arrangement.
• Git as shared memory. Every browser save auto-commits with a moonshine-edit: prefix, so the agent can see exactly what the author changed and build around their words.
• Comments back to the agent. The 💬 affordance sends feedback ("this is too hand-wavy") into .feedback/ files that the agent picks up at turn boundaries (Stop hook) or via the idle listener (/moonshine:moonshine-listen).

All of it is dev-only: vite build produces a plain, read-only static page with none of the editing machinery in the bundle.

Install

Marketplace (Claude Code, and Codex via the same marketplace):

/plugin marketplace add enjalot/moonshine
/plugin install moonshine@moonshine-marketplace

Restart the session. Claude Code invokes with /moonshine:still and /moonshine:shine; Codex with $still and $shine (or just describe the article you want).

Manual install (degraded — read the caveat):

# Claude Code
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

# Codex
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/enjalot/moonshine.git /tmp/moonshine
ln -s /tmp/moonshine/plugins/moonshine/skills/moonshine        ~/.codex/skills/moonshine
ln -s /tmp/moonshine/plugins/moonshine/skills/shine            ~/.codex/skills/shine
ln -s /tmp/moonshine/plugins/moonshine/skills/still            ~/.codex/skills/still
ln -s /tmp/moonshine/plugins/moonshine/skills/moonshine-listen ~/.codex/skills/moonshine-listen
ln -s /tmp/moonshine/plugins/moonshine/skills/critique         ~/.codex/skills/critique
# (use `cp -rL` instead of `ln -s` if you don't want to keep the clone around)

Caveat: a skills-directory install registers the skills but not the plugin's Stop hook, so feedback comments are only picked up when the listener skill runs — the automatic turn-boundary delivery needs the marketplace install. Everything else works.

Windows note: this repo uses git symlinks for shared skill assets. Run git config --global core.symlinks true before cloning.

To develop against your checkout instead, see DEVELOPING.md (symlink install, dev harness, repo map).

Usage

/moonshine:still                    # start from scratch (structured project)
/moonshine:still fourier transforms # start with a topic
/moonshine:shine fourier transforms # single-file flavor
/moonshine:critique                 # adversarially review an article (still or shine)
/moonshine:moonshine-listen         # feedback listener (best under /loop)