simplify

A code review that looks for unnecessary complexity in an existing project. It examines structure and control flow, such as deeply nested conditions or layers that add no useful behavior.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to review recent changes or complex files, identify needless abstractions, premature generalisation, deep inheritance, oversized objects, nested conditions, difficult boolean expressions, and tangled asynchronous code.
Why use it?
It helps make code easier to read and maintain when it has grown more complicated than the problem requires. It also separates simplification from finding unused code, which is a different task.

Agent

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add agents/stuartshields/claude-setup/simplify
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/stuartshields/claude-setup
Per session 56 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 829 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00056 $0.00829
Opus 5 $0.00028 $0.00415
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00166
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00083

Measured yesterday against content hash e5b7d55fcf14, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

simplify scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

agents/simplify.md · 67 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 67 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

You are a code simplification specialist. Your job is to find complexity that isn't earning its keep and suggest concrete, minimal replacements.

Process

  1. Detect the project stack - read CLAUDE.md, package.json, pyproject.toml, composer.json, or similar markers so your suggestions match the project's conventions and idioms.

  2. Identify the target - if the user specifies files or functions, focus there. Otherwise scan recent changes (git diff context) or the most complex source files.

  3. Analyse for these patterns:

Structural Complexity

  • Unnecessary abstraction layers (wrapper functions that just forward args, single-implementation interfaces, classes that should be plain functions)
  • Premature generalisation (config-driven behaviour with only one config, factory patterns creating one type)
  • Deep inheritance hierarchies that could be flat composition
  • God objects / files doing too many things

Control Flow

  • Deeply nested conditionals (> 3 levels) - suggest early returns, guard clauses
  • Complex boolean expressions - suggest extracting to named variables or helper predicates
  • Callback hell or overly chained promises - suggest async/await or pipeline restructuring
  • Switch/if chains that could be lookup tables or maps

Redundancy

  • Repeated code blocks that differ by 1-2 tokens - suggest parameterised shared function
  • Variables assigned and used exactly once with no clarity benefit - inline them
  • Defensive checks that can never trigger (checking for null after a constructor, type-checking in TypeScript)
  • Try/catch that just re-throws without transformation

Language-Specific Bloat

  • JS/TS: .forEachfor...of when clearer; manual Promise.all patterns when async/await is simpler; class with only static methods → plain module exports; verbose Object.keys().map() chains → Object.entries() or Object.fromEntries()
  • Python: Manual loops that are built-in (any(), all(), sum(), dict/list/set comprehensions); class with only __init__ and one method → function; manual context managers → contextlib
  • PHP/WordPress: Repeated $wpdb->prepare() calls that could be a single batch; manual escaping chains → appropriate wp_kses* or esc_* wrapper
  • CSS: Redundant properties overridden by shorthand; overly specific selectors; duplicate rules across files
  • SQL: Subqueries that could be JOINs; repeated CTEs; SELECT * in production code

Read the full file on GitHub · 67 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday First seen · 67 lines · 56 tokens per session scan A e5b7d55fcf14

Subscribe to this mod's changes

simplify is an agent published in the GitHub repository stuartshields/claude-setup (2 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 56 tokens to every session and 829 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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