maintenance

A code-cleanup guide for removing unused code, repeated logic, unnecessary layers, and unused configuration while keeping behavior unchanged.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to simplify existing code, delete dead branches or exports, remove duplication, and verify that the result still behaves the same.
Why use it?
It helps reduce code size and complexity without turning cleanup into an accidental feature change.

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/douglance/sdlc-plugin/maintenance
Any agent
npx skills add douglance/sdlc-plugin --skill maintenance
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/douglance/sdlc-plugin

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 20 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 329 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 $0.00020 $0.00329
Opus 5 $0.00010 $0.00164
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00066
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00033

Measured 2d ago against content hash d067c69aa6cf, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

maintenance 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.

.agents/skills/maintenance/SKILL.md · 37 lines

What it actually says

Use lifecycle-documentation only when the result needs a durable artifact or handoff.

Make the code smaller. Remove dead code, cut duplication and needless indirection, and simplify — without changing behavior.

Prefer deletion over rewriting. Make the smallest diff. If a cut alters behavior, it's out of scope — revert it.

When complexity comes from a cluster of rules, exceptions, adapters, or workarounds, run find-simplifying-insight before doing local cleanup. Accept a deeper model change only when it preserves behavior, makes a novel prediction, and survives a decisive test.

What to cut

  • Dead code — unused functions, exports, branches, variables.
  • Duplication — repeated logic that can collapse.
  • Needless indirection — layers and abstractions that earn nothing: indirection that adds coupling without improving cohesion or hiding a decision.
  • Over-configuration — options and flexibility nobody uses.

The rule

Behavior must not change. Prove it with the verify command before and after. Report net lines removed and one line per file changed.

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 · 37 lines · 20 tokens per session scan A d067c69aa6cf

Subscribe to this mod's changes

maintenance is a skill published in the GitHub repository douglance/sdlc-plugin (4 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 20 tokens to every session and 329 once invoked, about $0.0001 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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