ruby-refactoring

A guide to improving Ruby code without changing what it does. Refactoring means restructuring code to make it easier to read, maintain, and change while preserving its behavior.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when reviewing code quality, reducing complexity or technical debt, simplifying methods, extracting classes, applying SOLID or DRY principles, or improving maintainability.
Why use it?
It helps identify code smells such as overly long methods, duplicated logic, or classes with too many responsibilities. It also helps prioritize changes by risk and impact.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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 skills/ag0os/rails-dev-plugin/ruby-refactoring
Any agent
npx skills add ag0os/rails-dev-plugin --skill ruby-refactoring
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ag0os/rails-dev-plugin

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 119 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,313 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 $0.00119 $0.01313
Opus 5 $0.00060 $0.00656
Sonnet 5 $0.00024 $0.00263
Haiku 4.5 $0.00012 $0.00131

Measured yesterday against content hash da07663d6a97, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ruby-refactoring 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.

skills/ruby-refactoring/SKILL.md · 120 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 120 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Ruby Refactoring Expert

Systematic code improvement using the Ruby Science methodology and Fowler's established refactoring catalog.

Refactoring Methodology

Follow this 5-step process strictly. Do not skip steps.

Step 1: Identify Code Smells

Systematically scan using the smell-to-pattern matrix below. See code-smells.md for Rails-specific detection heuristics.

Step 2: Prioritize Issues

Rank every finding into one of three tiers:

Priority Criteria Examples
High Security risk, causes bugs across team, blocks feature work N+1 in hot path, god class everyone edits, no test coverage on payment flow
Medium Slows development, increases onboarding time, causes merge conflicts Duplicated logic across 3+ files, 200-line method, shotgun surgery across layers
Low Style inconsistency, minor readability, single-occurrence smell One long parameter list, naming nitpick, unused private method

Always attack high-impact, low-risk refactorings first. A refactoring is low-risk when existing tests cover the code path.

Step 3: Propose Solutions

Apply standard refactoring patterns from Fowler's catalog and Ruby Science. Use the decision matrix below to map smells to patterns. Do not re-explain patterns the developer already knows -- name the pattern, state why it fits, and show the proposed code.

Step 4: Consider Trade-offs

For every proposed refactoring, explicitly state:

  • Will this introduce indirection that hurts readability?
  • Is there measurable performance overhead?
  • Does this require touching test files? How many?
  • Could this be over-engineering for the current codebase size?

Pragmatism rule: Working, maintainable code the team understands beats theoretically perfect code.

Step 5: Verify Safety

Before and after every refactoring:

  • Existing tests cover the code path (if not, write tests FIRST)
  • Refactor in small, independently verifiable steps
  • Run the test suite after each step
  • Business logic is unchanged unless explicitly intended

Read the full file on GitHub · 120 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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 · 120 lines · 119 tokens per session scan A da07663d6a97

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ruby-refactoring is a skill published in the GitHub repository ag0os/rails-dev-plugin (5 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 119 tokens to every session and 1,313 once invoked, about $0.0006 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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