improve-codebase-architecture

A process that scans a codebase for architectural improvements and produces a visual HTML report before examining a chosen improvement in detail.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to review recently changed areas, identify refactoring opportunities, and investigate one selected architectural issue.
Why use it?
It helps find code structures that make testing, future changes, or understanding the project harder.

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/asteasolutions/ai-toolkit/improve-codebase-architecture
Any agent
npx skills add asteasolutions/ai-toolkit --skill improve-codebase-architecture
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/asteasolutions/ai-toolkit

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 32 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,297 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 $0.00032 $0.01297
Opus 5 $0.00016 $0.00648
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00259
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00130

Measured 2d ago against content hash 113b32edad5f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

improve-codebase-architecture 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 2d ago.

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.

.claude/skills/improve-codebase-architecture/SKILL.md · 71 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 71 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Improve Codebase Architecture

Surface architectural friction and propose deepening opportunities — refactors that turn shallow modules into deep ones. The aim is testability and AI-navigability.

This command is built on a shared design vocabulary and informed by whatever domain knowledge the project already records:

  • Run the /codebase-design skill for the architecture vocabulary (module, interface, depth, seam, adapter, leverage, locality) and its principles (the deletion test, "the interface is the test surface", "one adapter = hypothetical seam, two = real"). Use these terms exactly in every suggestion — don't drift into "component," "service," "API," or "boundary."
  • Discover and use existing domain knowledge and decision records when they are present. Do not assume specific filenames or create a documentation layout when they are absent.

Process

1. Explore

Scope before you scan — YAGNI. Deepening a module pays off by making future changes to it easier, so put extra weight on the parts of the codebase that have recently changed. Decide where to look before you look:

  • If the user named a direction — a module, a subsystem, a pain point — take it, and skip the inference below.
  • Otherwise, walk back a good stretch of the commit history (git log --oneline) to find the codebase's hot spots — the files and areas that keep coming up — and let those paths pull your attention first. If the changes are scattered with no clear hot spot, widen the net.

Before scanning, discover and read any existing domain knowledge and decision records for the area you're touching. If none exist, use the language in the code and the user's request.

Then use the Agent tool with subagent_type=Explore to walk the codebase. Don't follow rigid heuristics — explore organically and note where you experience friction:

  • Where does understanding one concept require bouncing between many small modules?
  • Where are modules shallow — interface nearly as complex as the implementation?
  • Where have pure functions been extracted just for testability, but the real bugs hide in how they're called (no locality)?
  • Where do tightly-coupled modules leak across their seams?
  • Which parts of the codebase are untested, or hard to test through their current interface?

Read the full file on GitHub · 71 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. 2d ago First seen · 71 lines · 32 tokens per session scan A 113b32edad5f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

improve-codebase-architecture is a skill published in the GitHub repository asteasolutions/ai-toolkit (5 stars, last pushed 6d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 32 tokens to every session and 1,297 once invoked, about $0.0002 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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