code-simplifier

A code-cleanup add-on for making working code clearer, more consistent, and easier to maintain without changing its behavior.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when you explicitly want a refactoring, simplification, or broader cleanup pass over code that already works.
Why use it?
It reduces unnecessary complexity while preserving the code's existing outputs, interfaces, tests, and edge-case behavior.

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/darrencroton/ai-agent-coder/code-simplifier
Any agent
npx skills add darrencroton/ai-agent-coder --skill code-simplifier
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/darrencroton/ai-agent-coder

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 49 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 598 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 $0.00049 $0.00598
Opus 5 $0.00024 $0.00299
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00120
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00060

Measured yesterday against content hash 22271a875859, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

code-simplifier 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/code-simplifier/SKILL.md · 43 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 43 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Code Simplifier

Use this skill for a separate improvement pass over code that already works. It is not part of the default scoped-implementation workflow: the user invokes it deliberately, with existing behaviour, tests, or outputs available to compare against. Be ambitious about simplification, but never change what the code does — only how it does it.

Boundaries

  • Preserve functionality exactly. Product behaviour, public contracts, data shapes, test meaning, and accepted edge cases are fixed. If a meaningful simplification would require changing any of them, report it as a recommendation instead of making the change.
  • Respect frozen contracts. After an implementation-plan or scoped-implementation workflow, treat the implemented behaviour and its accepted edge cases as part of the contract. Simplification is never a back door for scope expansion.
  • Use the requested scope. For a holistic pass, inspect enough surrounding code to simplify the design coherently. For a narrow request, refine only the named files or functions.

Standards Come From the Project

Discover conventions rather than importing them: read AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, CONTRIBUTING, linter/formatter configuration, and the surrounding code, then match what the project actually does — naming, module layout, error-handling idiom, comment density, import style, test structure. Do not impose conventions from another ecosystem onto this one.

What To Improve

  • Reduce unnecessary complexity, nesting, and indirection.
  • Eliminate redundant code and abstractions that no longer earn their place.
  • Improve names where the current ones obscure intent.
  • Consolidate related logic that has drifted apart.
  • Remove comments that restate the code; keep the ones that carry constraints the code cannot show.
  • Prefer explicit, boring constructs over clever or dense ones — clarity beats brevity, and deeply nested conditional expressions usually read worse than a plain conditional.

What To Avoid

Read the full file on GitHub · 43 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 · 43 lines · 49 tokens per session scan A 22271a875859

Subscribe to this mod's changes

code-simplifier is a skill published in the GitHub repository darrencroton/ai-agent-coder (2 stars, last pushed 6d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 49 tokens to every session and 598 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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