illustration-finder

A Claude Code skill for building and searching a personal illustration bank — stories, quotes, analogies, stats, and examples that sharpen your writing.

The bank grows over time. Add an entry when you encounter a story worth keeping. Search it when you need a concrete example. The right illustration surfaces instead of getting forgotten.

What it does

ADD mode — save an illustration to your bank with a title, type, themes, content, and source. The bank is a plain markdown file you can edit directly.

FIND mode — keyword search across titles, themes, and content. Relevance-scored so the best matches come first. Optionally search the web for stories and case studies, cited in Turabian style.

Install

1. Download or clone this repo
2. Copy the skill folder into your Claude skills directory:

cp -r illustration-finder ~/.claude/skills/illustration-finder

That's it. The skill will be available the next time you start a Claude Code session.

Usage

Add an illustration

Say /illustration-add or "save this to my illustration bank." Claude will ask for details and call the script, or you can call it directly:

python3 ~/.claude/skills/illustration-finder/scripts/add_illustration.py \
  --title "The Excel No One Could Read" \
  --type story \
  --themes "data,AI,hidden-complexity,problem-solving" \
  --content "A client's database stored payment status as cell background color. No standard tool could read it. We described the structure to Claude in plain English and it wrote a Python script that decoded the colors and produced a clean flat table." \
  --source "Personal consulting experience, 2025"

Types: story · quote · analogy · stat · example

Search your bank

Say /illustration-find resilience or "do I have a story about failure?" Claude searches locally first and presents results with a "use this to illustrate" suggestion. Or call it directly:

python3 ~/.claude/skills/illustration-finder/scripts/search_illustrations.py "resilience failure" --limit 5

Add --web to also search the internet. Web results are cited in Turabian style (see references/turabian.md).

Bank format

The bank is a plain markdown file at ~/.claude/illustration-bank.md. Each entry looks like this:

---

## The Excel No One Could Read

**Type:** story
**Themes:** data, AI, hidden-complexity, problem-solving
**Added:** 2026-03-05
**Source:** Personal consulting experience, 2025

A client's database stored payment status as cell background color...

You can edit it directly. The search script parses it by splitting on --- separators.

Global vs. project-local banks

By default the bank lives at ~/.claude/illustration-bank.md and is shared across all your projects.

For project-scoped content (a specific client, a personal writing project, a separate domain), keep a local bank:

# Add to a project-local bank
python3 ~/.claude/skills/illustration-finder/scripts/add_illustration.py \
  --title "..." --type story --themes "..." --content "..." \
  --db ./illustration-bank.md

# Search the project-local bank
python3 ~/.claude/skills/illustration-finder/scripts/search_illustrations.py "query" \
  --db ./illustration-bank.md

Claude will search both banks when a project-local one exists alongside the global one.

Requirements

Python 3 (stdlib only — no dependencies).