thermo-nuclear-code-quality-review

Thermo-Nuclear Code Quality Review

Use this skill for an unusually strict review focused on implementation quality, maintainability, abstraction quality, and codebase health.

Above all, be ambitious about code structure. Do not merely identify local cleanup opportunities. Actively search for "code judo" moves: restructurings that preserve behavior while making the implementation dramatically simpler, smaller, more direct, and more elegant.

Core Prompt

Perform a deep code quality audit of the current branch's changes. Rethink how to structure / implement the changes to meaningfully improve code quality without impacting behavior. Work to improve abstractions, modularity, reduce spaghetti code, improve succinctness and legibility. Be ambitious: if there is a clear path to improving the implementation that involves restructuring, go for it. Be extremely thorough and rigorous. Measure twice, cut once.

Non-Negotiable Additional Standards

1. Be ambitious about structural simplification. Do not stop at "this could be a bit cleaner." Look for opportunities to reframe the change so that whole branches, helpers, modes, conditionals or layers disappear entirely. Prefer the solution that makes the code feel inevitable in hindsight. If you see a path to delete complexity rather than rearrange it, push hard for that path.

2. Do not let a change push a file from under 1k lines to over 1k lines without a very strong reason. Treat it as a strong code-quality smell. Prefer extracting helpers, subcomponents or modules. Only waive this if the resulting file is still clearly organised.

3. Do not allow random spaghetti growth in existing code. Be highly suspicious of new ad-hoc conditionals, scattered special cases or one-off branches inserted into unrelated flows. If a change adds weird if statements in random places, treat that as a design problem, not a stylistic nit. Prefer pushing the logic into a dedicated abstraction, helper, state machine or policy object.