design-smell-detector

design-smell-detector is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from ArabelaTso/Skills-4-SE. It costs 114 tokens per session (3,108 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A code-review guide for finding design problems such as overly connected components, unfocused classes, and methods that do too much. These problems are often called code smells because they suggest future maintenance trouble.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to scan a file or directory, identify issues such as God classes, high coupling, low cohesion, feature envy, and long methods, and find refactoring opportunities.
Why use it?
It makes structural weaknesses visible and points to places where responsibilities or dependencies may need reorganizing.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to scan a file or directory, identify issues such as God classes, high coupling, low cohesion, feature envy, and long methods, and find refactoring opportunities.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/arabelatso/skills-4-se/design-smell-detector
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.

Any agent
npx skills add ArabelaTso/Skills-4-SE --skill design-smell-detector
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ArabelaTso/Skills-4-SE

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for design-smell-detector

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/arabelatso/skills-4-se/design-smell-detector/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/arabelatso/skills-4-se/design-smell-detector)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/arabelatso/skills-4-se/design-smell-detector"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/arabelatso/skills-4-se/design-smell-detector/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for design-smell-detector

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/arabelatso/skills-4-se/design-smell-detector"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/arabelatso/skills-4-se/design-smell-detector.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 114 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,108 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 5.1 $0.00114 $0.03108
Opus 5 $0.00057 $0.01554
Sonnet 5 $0.00023 $0.00622
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00311

Measured 12d ago against content hash 9d2db4accde4, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

design-smell-detector 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 12d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/detect_smells.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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/design-smell-detector/SKILL.md · 582 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 582 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Design Smell Detector

Identify and address design quality issues in code through automated smell detection and refactoring guidance.

Quick Start

Detect Design Smells

# Analyze a single file
python scripts/detect_smells.py src/app.py

# Analyze entire directory
python scripts/detect_smells.py src/

# Output as JSON
python scripts/detect_smells.py src/ --format json

Example Output

Found 5 design smell(s): 1 critical, 3 major, 1 minor

CRITICAL ISSUES:
  🔴 src/services.py:45 - God Class
     Class 'UserManager' has 25 methods (threshold: 20)
     💡 Split into multiple smaller, focused classes

MAJOR ISSUES:
  🟠 src/models.py:120 - Low Cohesion
     Class 'Order' has low cohesion (score: 0.25)
     💡 Group related methods/attributes or split class

  🟠 src/utils.py:89 - Long Method
     Method 'process_order' has 67 lines (threshold: 50)
     💡 Extract smaller methods or refactor

Design Smells Detected

Coupling Smells

High Coupling: Too many dependencies

  • Module imports > 20
  • Constructor dependencies > 10
  • Changes cascade across classes

Feature Envy: Method uses other class more than own

  • External access > internal access
  • Method should move to envied class

Inappropriate Intimacy: Classes too tightly coupled

  • Accessing private fields of other classes
  • Excessive use of getters/setters

Cohesion Smells

Low Cohesion: Class members unrelated

  • LCOM (Lack of Cohesion) > 0.7
  • Methods don't share instance variables
  • Class has multiple responsibilities

God Class: Class knows/does too much

  • Methods > 20
  • Attributes > 15
  • Lines of code > 500

Complexity Smells

High Cyclomatic Complexity: Too many decision points

  • Complexity > 10
  • Deeply nested conditionals
  • Many if/else, loops

Long Method: Method too long

  • Lines of code > 50
  • Multiple responsibilities
  • Hard to understand

Size Smells

Long Parameter List: Too many parameters

  • Parameters > 5
  • Related parameters not grouped
  • Method signature hard to understand

Read the full file on GitHub · 582 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 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. 12d ago First seen · 582 lines · 114 tokens per session scan A 9d2db4accde4

Subscribe to this mod's changes

design-smell-detector is a skill published in the GitHub repository ArabelaTso/Skills-4-SE (252 stars, last pushed 22d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 114 tokens to every session and 3,108 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 2026-08-30.

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