simplify

A workflow that has several reviewers examine recent code changes in parallel, then applies the accepted cleanup edits one at a time.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to review and simplify recent code changes, optionally focusing every reviewer on a concern such as memory efficiency.
Why use it?
It speeds up review while preventing reviewers from overwriting each other's edits. Unclear suggestions are recorded as not applied instead of interrupting the process.

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/gtapps/claude-code-hermit/simplify
Any agent
npx skills add gtapps/claude-code-hermit --skill simplify
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/gtapps/claude-code-hermit

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 34 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,366 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 $0.00034 $0.03366
Opus 5 $0.00017 $0.01683
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00673
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00337

Measured 2d ago against content hash 01329393183d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

simplify 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/simplify/SKILL.md · 188 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 188 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Simplify — parallel review, sequential apply

Spawns three focused review subagents in parallel, each returning a list of suggested edits. The main agent then applies them sequentially, resolving conflicts deterministically using the Principles below. The skill is non-interactive: it never stops to ask the user. When the Principles don't pick a clear winner, the finding is logged as "not applied" rather than surfaced as a question — the user reads the final report and re-engages if they want one of the rejected proposals.

Why review-then-apply and not apply-in-parallel: if three subagents Edit the same files concurrently, they race. Late writers either fail loudly (Edit's old_string mismatch) or — worse — see "my change is already there" and silently skip, so most findings get dropped. Parallelizing the slow part (analysis) while serializing writes gives both speed and correctness.

If $ARGUMENTS contains a focus hint (e.g. "memory efficiency"), pass it through to all three subagents so they weight that dimension.

Principles every reviewer must follow

These are cross-cutting — they apply to every finding regardless of reviewer category. The main agent passes them into each reviewer's prompt.

  1. Preserve behavior. Any change to return values, exceptions, edge-case handling, or observable side effects is a behavior change, not a simplification. If a refactor alters output for any input — even malformed or "invalid" input the original happened to accept — it's not a cleanup, it's a redesign. Don't propose those as simplifications; if you spot one and think it's worth doing, label it explicitly so the user can decide.

  2. Clarity over brevity. Fewer lines is not the goal; a reader understanding the code at a glance is. Avoid nested ternaries when if/elif/else reads clearer. Don't wrap trivial operations in named helpers just to "reuse" something — multiplyTwoNumbers(n, n) is worse than n * n, not better. A short dense one-liner is worse than a two-line form a reader can follow on first pass.

Read the full file on GitHub · 188 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. 2d ago First seen · 188 lines · 34 tokens per session scan A 01329393183d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

simplify is a skill published in the GitHub repository gtapps/claude-code-hermit (73 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 34 tokens to every session and 3,366 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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