safe-refactor

safe-refactor is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from JuliusBrussee/caveman. It costs 29 tokens per session (121 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A skill for restructuring code while keeping its behavior unchanged.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to extract code, combine duplicate code, move ownership between parts of a project, or perform other structural cleanup.
Why use it?
It supports cleanup and reorganizing work with checks before and after the edits, reducing the chance of accidental behavior changes.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for Claude Code and Codex: shipped in a Claude Code plugin, but also agents/openai.yaml present.

Part of the caveman plugin — 22 skills, 9 commands, 3 agents shipped together

Good fit Use it to extract code, combine duplicate code, move ownership between parts of a project, or perform other structural cleanup.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/juliusbrussee/caveman/safe-refactor
About the project

caveman is a skill and proxy for coding agents that shortens unnecessary explanatory prose so agents use fewer tokens while leaving code, commands, paths, and error messages unchanged. It is for people using coding agents who want terse responses and lower token use, including with Claude-based workflows. The catalogue entries contain its skills, commands, agents, instructions, and plugins.

JuliusBrussee/caveman · 114,132 stars · on GitHub · docs.caveman.so

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.

Any agent
npx skills add JuliusBrussee/caveman --skill safe-refactor
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/JuliusBrussee/caveman

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install caveman, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 22 skills, 9 commands, 3 agents.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for safe-refactor

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/juliusbrussee/caveman/safe-refactor/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/juliusbrussee/caveman/safe-refactor)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/juliusbrussee/caveman/safe-refactor"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/juliusbrussee/caveman/safe-refactor/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for safe-refactor

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/juliusbrussee/caveman/safe-refactor"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/juliusbrussee/caveman/safe-refactor.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 29 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 121 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • Socket pass 17 Aug 2026
  • Snyk pass 17 Aug 2026
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 5.1 $0.00029 $0.00121
Opus 5.5 $0.00012 $0.00048
Sonnet 5.5 $0.00006 $0.00024
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00012

Measured 1mo ago against content hash cd52867aba26, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

safe-refactor 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 1mo 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.

Origin

Copies of this mod

2 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

skills/safe-refactor/SKILL.md · 17 lines

What it actually says

Safe refactor

Define behavior-preservation boundary and establish verification before structural edits.

  • Keep feature changes outside refactor.
  • Move one ownership boundary at a time.
  • Preserve public interfaces, failure behavior, ordering, and compatibility unless explicitly scoped.
  • Keep intermediate states buildable and testable.
  • Avoid dependency or configuration growth without correctness need.

Run same proof after change. Stop when behavior matches and requested structure is achieved.

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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. 1mo ago First seen · 17 lines · 29 tokens per session scan A cd52867aba26

Subscribe to this mod's changes

safe-refactor is a skill published in the GitHub repository JuliusBrussee/caveman (114,132 stars, last pushed today), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 29 tokens to every session and 121 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5.5. 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.