atref's picker open over the desktop, listing second-brain guides like Git Commit Guide and Blog Writing Guide

I’ve been curating my second brain for a few months now. Whenever I find an interesting article or a skill, I read it and write a note. When I catch myself sending Claude the same kind of prompt over and over, I turn it into a guide. I’ve got a guide for how to commit, one for how to write specs, one for how to update agents.md.

They work great inside my vault. The friction shows up when I’m in another repo. I’ll be deep in some project with Claude Code or Codex, I want it to follow my commit guide, and there’s no clean way to hand it over. I tab to VS Code, copy the file path, and paste it back so the agent can read it.

I could turn these guides into skills. Skills are a genuinely smart idea, I’m a fan. They lean on progressive disclosure, the agent reads a short description, decides the skill is relevant, then pulls in the full instructions only when it needs them, so the context stays lean. It’s a real solution to a real problem, getting curated knowledge into agents and sharing it across people and teams, and it’s already helping a lot of people.

My case is just different. A skill is a distribution mechanism, and I don’t have a distribution problem. My commit guide is for me, I’m not shipping it to anyone. If I ever needed to share it, I’d reach for a skill without thinking twice. For my own use though, packaging it up for a distribution I don’t need is more work than the problem deserves, the guide’s already sitting there, I just want to point at it.

There are a couple of practical reasons too. Skills have to be installed where each agent looks for them, so today the same guide ends up duplicated across Claude Code’s folder, Codex’s folder, every machine I use, or I keep them in sync with symlinks. Now that skills are heading into the Agentic AI Foundation, where AWS, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI are already agreeing on shared standards, I’d bet we get a single folder every harness reads from and the duplication goes away.

Then there’s activation. Even with a skill installed, the agent decides when to pull it in, and sometimes it doesn’t. Vercel ran a nice eval on this, a skill sitting right there got invoked in fewer than half the runs, and a plain routing index in their AGENTS.md scored higher, 100% against 79% for skills with explicit instructions. That’s not a knock on skills, it’s the nature of auto-invocation, and I expect it to climb toward perfect as the models get better at judging relevance. For now though, for something like my commit guide, I’d rather not leave the loading to that judgment, I’d rather point at it and know it’s there.

So even when those rough edges get smoothed out, I’ll still reference my guides instead of packaging them, I don’t have a distribution problem and that part won’t change. The only thing missing was a fast way to drop the reference in wherever I’m typing.

Claude Code already has a great @ picker, you type @, fuzzy-find a file, and it lands in context. The catch is it’s built around the current working directory. I’ve tried /add-dir to pull my second brain in as an extra directory, but the @ UX doesn’t really work with the added dirs, it still only fuzzy-finds cleanly inside the cwd. So from another repo I can’t reach my guides through it.

I also noticed that if I hand Claude Code the full path with an @ in front, it reads the whole guide in one shot, no listing the directory, no grepping, no three-turn detour where it skims the first 20 lines and moves on. The full @-path pulls in the entire document. At least in Claude Code, Codex treats it more like a plain path.

That’s atref. It’s a small tool that puts a Claude-Code-style @ picker in any text field. I hit Ctrl+Space and a fuzzy picker pops up right at my cursor, nothing to go open. I start typing the name of the guide, it fuzzy-matches across the folders I’ve pointed it at, handles CamelHumps so I can type gcg and it finds Git Commit Guide, and does smart-case so I don’t have to think about capitals. Enter drops the full @-path in where I’m typing, and the guide’s in context.

It’s picky about what it indexes. I point it at the folders I want and rank them by priority, so my most-used guides surface first. It’s git-aware, it follows .gitignore and skips the node_modules and target noise. A file-watcher keeps the index live, so new guides show up without a restart. It all runs as a small Rust app in the tray.

atref's picker fuzzy-matching the query 'writing style guide' down to a single result

It’s early. Right now it’s Windows only, v0.1 is rough, and it does exactly one thing. But it works, I use it every day to pull my guides into Claude Code and Codex from whatever repo I’m in.

If you want to try it, install with Scoop or PowerShell:

# Scoop
scoop bucket add atref https://github.com/JuanjoFuchs/atref
scoop install atref

# or run the installer directly
irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/JuanjoFuchs/atref/main/install.ps1 | iex

winget support is coming soon. The repo’s open at github.com/JuanjoFuchs/atref, so if something breaks, or there’s a reference format you want it to insert, tell me. I’d also like to hear what you’d @-reference first.