Turning a directory tree into a single LLM prompt, minus the tedium

What it does

files-to-prompt is a command-line utility that walks directories, filters files, and dumps their contents into a single stream of text. It respects .gitignore by default, skips hidden files, and lets you include or exclude paths with fnmatch patterns. The output is formatted with file paths and separators, ready to be piped into an LLM or saved to disk.

The interesting bit

The real value is in the formatting options tailored for LLMs: it can wrap everything in Anthropic’s Claude XML structure or emit Markdown fenced code blocks with guessed language tags, even handling nested triple backticks by extending the fence. It is essentially glue code, but it is thoughtful glue code that handles the edge cases you would otherwise hit five minutes in.

Key highlights

• Respects .gitignore and hidden-file conventions by default, so you don’t accidentally dump your .env into the context window.
• Supports fnmatch ignore patterns and extension filtering to narrow the file set.
• Outputs in plain text, Claude XML (--cxml), or Markdown (--markdown) with automatic language-tag guessing.
• Reads file lists from stdin, including NUL-separated paths for safe handling of filenames containing spaces.
• Optionally prefixes every line with line numbers.

Verdict

Anyone regularly feeding code or documentation to LLMs will save time. If you rarely need more than a single file, your shell’s built-ins are already enough.