deslop

Deslop — the pass that removes rather than adds

Every story here owes an optimization pass, and until this file existed the pass was whatever the agent felt like that afternoon. This is what one is.

The default action is deletion. A pass that ends with more lines than it started with was a refactor, and a refactor is a different piece of work with a different risk profile. "Started with" means the state immediately before THIS pass, not the branch point — a story that adds a feature adds lines, and judging the pass by the whole branch diff condemns it in advance. That number is then invisible to everyone but you, so make it recomputable: commit the story's work, then commit the pass separately. Measured: an author counting honestly from its own uncommitted draft and a reviewer counting from the branch point produced a blocking CHANGES-REQUESTED and an arbitration, with neither agent wrong on its own terms. If you cannot delete anything, say so and stop — that is a complete and respectable outcome.

The order, and why it is an order

1. Pin the behaviour BEFORE you touch anything. Run the relevant tests and keep the output. A green run after an edit proves nothing on its own: you do not know it was green before. If no test covers the area, write the narrowest one that does, and it must go red when you break the behaviour on purpose — otherwise it is not a net, it is decoration.
2. One smell class per pass, verified between passes. Dead code, then duplication, then naming and error handling, then tests. Bundling them produces a diff nobody can review and a bisect that cannot isolate the change that broke something.
3. Re-read the diff as the reviewer will. Anything in it that is not the smell you set out to remove comes back out.

What counts as slop

• Dead code — unreachable branches, unused exports, stale flags, debugging left in place, backwards-compatibility shims for something nothing calls. Verify it is unused before deleting; "I could not find a caller" and "there is no caller" are different statements and only one of them is a fact.
• Duplication that has diverged. Two copies that agree are a cost; two copies that quietly disagree are a defect.
• Pass-through wrappers and single-use helpers. Indirection that costs a jump and buys nothing. Three similar lines beat a premature abstraction — the abstraction commits you to a shape you have seen once.
• Defensive handling for states that cannot occur on a trusted internal path. It reads as care and works as camouflage: the catch that cannot fire today is the one that swallows the real error next year.
• Casts that exist to silence a type error rather than to state a truth the compiler cannot see.
• Work nobody asked for — an improvement, a rename, a docstring, a reformat on code the story never touched. It inflates the diff, hides the real change, and puts an unreviewed decision in someone else's file.
• Comments restating the line below them. Keep the comment that explains WHY, delete the one that narrates WHAT.