ce-simplify-code

A code-cleanup skill for recently changed software. It makes code clearer, easier to reuse, higher quality, or more efficient while keeping its behavior exactly the same.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it after coding and before review to simplify the current branch’s changes or another clearly specified scope.
Why use it?
It removes avoidable complexity after implementation without turning cleanup into an accidental feature change. It also limits the review to an identified set of changed files.

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/everyinc/compound-engineering-plugin/ce-simplify-code
Any agent
npx skills add EveryInc/compound-engineering-plugin --skill ce-simplify-code
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/EveryInc/compound-engineering-plugin

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 39 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,272 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 $0.00039 $0.01272
Opus 5 $0.00019 $0.00636
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00254
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00127

Measured 2d ago against content hash f7295ebe360f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ce-simplify-code 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.

skills/ce-simplify-code/SKILL.md · 65 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 65 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Simplify recently changed code for clarity, reuse, quality, and efficiency while preserving exact behavior. Prioritize readable, explicit code over compact code — fewer lines is not the goal.

Step 1: Identify scope

Resolve the simplification scope in this order:

  1. User-named scope is authoritative; do not widen it.
  2. Otherwise, in git, use the current branch versus its base. Without a usable base, use staged and unstaged changes (git diff HEAD).
  3. Outside git or without a diff, use files the user named or that were edited earlier in the conversation.

If none of the above produces a non-empty scope, stop and ask the user what to simplify rather than guessing. Use the host's blocking question tool already in the current tool list (match by capability, not by a host-specific name). Presence in the current tool list is proof the tool exists; never call a user-facing question tool to discover whether it exists. If a matching tool is listed but unloaded, use the host's tool-discovery primitive to load that capability — do not search for another host's tool name. Fall back to numbered options on the host's user-visible chat surface only when no such tool is in the list or a real question call errors. Never silently skip the question.

Preflight. If the scope has no substantive human-authored code — only documentation, generated or vendored files, dependencies or lockfiles, or mechanical churn — report that there is nothing to simplify and stop without reviewers. For mixed scopes, retain only the code. This is a kind gate, never a size gate: explicit small scopes still run, and callers own any size or cost threshold.

When the platform's task-tracking capability is available, show the review, apply, and verification outcomes without creating one task per reviewer. Otherwise continue without simulating a task list in chat.

Step 2: Launch 3 review agents in parallel

Dispatch three generic subagents — code-reuse, code-quality, and efficiency reviewers — via the platform's subagent primitive (Agent/Task in Claude Code, spawn_agent in Codex) where available; otherwise run the reviews inline or serially. For each reviewer, read its prompt asset from this skill's directory and pass the full file content as the subagent's prompt, together with the resolved scope (the full diff or file set) so it has complete context:

Read the full file on GitHub · 65 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 · 65 lines · 39 tokens per session scan A f7295ebe360f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ce-simplify-code is a skill published in the GitHub repository EveryInc/compound-engineering-plugin (24,696 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 39 tokens to every session and 1,272 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 2026-08-30.

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