simonw/files-to-prompt

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

2779 stars · 178 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

A Python CLI tool that concatenates a directory of files into a single prompt suitable for pasting into LLMs, with filtering by extension, ignore patterns, and output formats like Claude XML and Markdown. It is published on PyPI as files-to-prompt and actively maintained by Simon Willison.

Use cases

• concatenate a codebase into one prompt for an LLM
• feed multiple source files to Claude or ChatGPT
• prepare repository context for code review by an AI
• filter files by extension before sending to an LLM
• output files in Claude XML format
• include line numbers when sharing code with an LLM

When to choose

• you need to quickly assemble file contents into an LLM prompt from the terminal
• you want gitignore-aware filtering and multiple output formats
• you prefer a small pip-installable tool that pipes well with other commands

When to avoid

• you need an IDE plugin or GUI for building LLM context
• you need to send very large codebases exceeding model context limits
• you want automatic embedding or RAG-style retrieval instead of raw concatenation

Facets

cli-tool · maturity active

cli prompt-engineering developer-tools file-system developer-tools large-language-models files cli python cross-platform llm-prompting code-context file-concatenation cxml piped-output command-line

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="simonw/files-to-prompt")