complexity-recognition

A code-review method for finding where software has become difficult to understand or change, and identifying the underlying causes.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when diagnosing unclear complexity, deciding whether to refactor, or reviewing a file or module that collaborators find hard to work with.
Why use it?
It helps explain why small changes touch many files or cause bugs, instead of treating every difficult codebase as a collection of isolated design problems.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the clairvoyance plugin — 16 skills, 1 agent shipped together

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/codybrom/clairvoyance/complexity-recognition
Any agent
npx skills add codybrom/clairvoyance --skill complexity-recognition
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/codybrom/clairvoyance

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install clairvoyance, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 16 skills, 1 agent.

Per session 71 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,091 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 $0.00071 $0.01091
Opus 5 $0.00036 $0.00545
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00218
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00109

Measured 3d ago against content hash 1f0529824d77, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

complexity-recognition 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 3d 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.

skills/complexity-recognition/SKILL.md · 89 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 89 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Complexity Recognition Review Lens

When invoked with $ARGUMENTS, focus the analysis on the specified file or module. Read the target code first, then apply the checks below.

"Complexity is anything related to the structure of a software system that makes it hard to understand and modify the system." — John Ousterhout, A Philosophy of Software Design

Complexity is relative to the task: the same codebase can feel simple for one operation and painful for another. The writer of the code is often the worst judge of its complexity. If other collaborators (human or agent) find it complex, it is. Diagnose it using three symptoms, two root causes, and the fundamental formula.

When to Apply

  • When code feels harder to work with than it should be
  • When small changes require edits in many places
  • When developers frequently introduce bugs in unfamiliar code
  • During "should we refactor this?" discussions

Core Principles

The Complexity Formula

$$C = \sum_{p}(c_p \times t_p)$$

Each part's complexity weighted by how often developers work with it.

  • Complexity in frequently-touched code matters most
  • Encapsulating complexity where it won't be encountered is nearly as valuable as eliminating it

"Complexity is more apparent to readers than writers." — John Ousterhout, A Philosophy of Software Design

A gnarly subsystem that nobody modifies contributes almost nothing. A moderately messy module that every feature passes through dominates the total. A "simple" change to a high-traffic module matters more than a large refactor of something rarely touched.

Three Symptoms

1. Change Amplification

Directly measurable: count files touched for a single-concept change. Use this for refactoring prioritization.

2. Cognitive Load

Fewer lines does not always mean less cognitive load. A terse framework requiring reverse-engineering its entire mental model is not simpler. The question is how much do I need to know?

3. Unknown Unknowns

Unknown unknowns are the worst symptom because they are invisible. Change amplification is visible and cognitive load is navigable, but unknown unknowns let you finish a change feeling confident while the bug ships. The design goal that counters all three symptoms is to make the system obvious.

Read the full file on GitHub · 89 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. 3d ago First seen · 89 lines · 71 tokens per session scan A 1f0529824d77

Subscribe to this mod's changes

complexity-recognition is a skill published in the GitHub repository codybrom/clairvoyance (12 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 71 tokens to every session and 1,091 once invoked, about $0.0004 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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