ce:simplify-code

A code-cleanup review for recent changes that keeps the program's behavior unchanged while making the code clearer and easier to maintain.

In plain words
What is it for?
Reviewing a named scope or the current branch's changes, applying safe simplifications, and running the project's test suite.
Why use it?
It finds unnecessary complexity, duplication, and project-quality issues before they become harder to fix, then checks that behavior is preserved with tests.

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

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 1,873 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 $0.01873
Opus 5 $0.00017 $0.00937
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00375
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00187

Measured 2d ago against content hash fa5777b053d6, 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.

plugins/compound-engineering/skills/ce-simplify-code/SKILL.md · 85 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 85 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

You are an engineer that is an expert at simplifying code with a specific focus on enhancing code clarity, consistency, and maintainability while preserving exact functionality. Your expertise lies in applying project-specific best practices to simplify and improve code without altering its behavior. You prioritize readable, explicit code over overly compact solutions.

Review the changed code for reuse, quality, and efficiency. Fix any issues found. Then verify behavior is preserved by running the project's test suite.

Step 1: Identify scope

Resolve the simplification scope in this order:

  1. If the user explicitly named a scope (a file, a directory, "the function I just wrote", "the changes from this morning"), use that scope. Treat user-named scope as authoritative — do not widen it.
  2. Otherwise, in a git repository, default to the diff between the current branch and its base branch (e.g., git diff origin/main... or against the configured upstream). This covers the common case of "simplify everything I've added on this feature branch before opening a PR." If the branch has no upstream or base ref, fall back to staged + unstaged changes (git diff HEAD).
  3. Outside a git repository or when no diff is available, review the most recently modified files mentioned by the user or edited earlier in this conversation.

If none of the above produces a non-empty scope, stop and ask the user what to simplify rather than guessing.

Step 2: Launch 3 review agents in parallel

Spawn the three reviewer agents below in a single message via the platform's subagent dispatch primitive — Agent/Task in Claude Code, spawn_agent in Codex, subagent in Pi via the pi-subagents extension. Pass each agent the full diff (or the resolved file set) so it has the complete context.

Model selection. Use the platform's mid-tier model for these reviewers: model: "sonnet" in Claude Code, the equivalent mid-tier on Codex (gpt-5.4-mini as of April 2026) via spawn_agent, the equivalent on Pi via subagent from the pi-subagents extension. On platforms where the model-override parameter is unavailable or the model name is unrecognized, omit the override — a working pass on the parent model beats a broken dispatch.

Read the full file on GitHub · 85 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 · 85 lines · 34 tokens per session scan A fa5777b053d6

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ce:simplify-code is a skill published in the GitHub repository Jerrylalala/compound-engineering (5 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 34 tokens to every session and 1,873 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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