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.
npx agentmods add skills/melodic-software/claude-code-plugins/tidynpx skills add melodic-software/claude-code-plugins --skill tidygit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/melodic-software/claude-code-pluginsWhat 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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5 | $0.00175 | $0.05086 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00088 | $0.02543 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00035 | $0.01017 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00017 | $0.00509 |
Grade A, and why
tidy scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.
A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.
Nothing flagged
None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 230 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Pre-computed context
Current branch: !git branch --show-current 2>/dev/null || echo "unknown"
Recent commits: !git log --oneline -5 2>/dev/null || echo "no commits"
Working tree status (empty = clean): !{ git status --porcelain 2>/dev/null || echo "(git status unavailable)"; } | head -20
Open chore/tidy-* PRs: !${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/scripts/open-pr-count.sh 2>/dev/null | { grep -E '^(Open tidy|Throttle)' || echo "unknown"; }; :
Variables
Arguments: $ARGUMENTS
Purpose
Tidy is the proactive "Boy Scout in passing" loop. Step zero of the long-game improvement story. Answers: "What small structural improvements can I safely make to one slice of the codebase today, and ship as one tight PR, without mixing structural and behavioral changes?"
This skill encapsulates the agentic application of three converging ideas:
- Kent Beck, Tidy First? (2024). Small, named refactorings called "tidyings" (Beck's 15), separated from behavioral changes by commit and by PR. "Always one or the other, never both at the same time."
- Robert C. Martin / Steve Smith, Boy Scout Rule, leave the campsite cleaner than you found it. Empirically validated against the Pragmatic Programmer's Broken Windows hypothesis: small drift compounds.
- Adam Tornhill / CodeScene 2026, agentic refactoring research, autonomous AI agents introduce defects ~30% more often in unhealthy code. Agents need a higher Code Health bar than humans. Structure-only Boy Scout work is the safest agentic move.
What tidy is NOT. Read carefully, differentiation matters:
- Not
/simplify(Claude Code's bundled skill). That takes the conversation's recent diff and tightens it. Tidy hunts a lane independent of recent activity. - Not
batch-simplify(this plugin's sibling skill). That sweeps an entire scope in waves: a time-window diff, a branch diff, or the whole repository. Tidy targets a glob-scoped lane and stops when the scope budget is hit. On documentation specifically: batch-simplify owns factual staleness across the whole doc set in one pass; tidy'sdocs-proselane owns incremental structural prose work under a scope budget. - Not issue-tracker work. Tidy never starts from a filed item; it discovers improvements not yet filed, and files overflow as deferred items.
- Not a docs fact-checker. Tidy improves structure, not factual accuracy.
What ships with it
13 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.
- evals/evals.json 4.2 KB
- lanes/docs-prose.md 5.8 KB
- lanes/self-update.md 4.0 KB
- lanes/shell-tooling.md 8.3 KB
- reference/exclusions.md 8.0 KB
- reference/scope-budget.md 6.8 KB
- reference/tidyings.md 13 KB
- scripts/open-pr-count.sh 1.4 KB runs code
- scripts/open-pr-count.test.sh 2.4 KB runs code
- templates/apps-lane.template.md 1.6 KB
- templates/dependency-root-lane.template.md 2.2 KB
- templates/host-wiring-lane.template.md 1.8 KB
- templates/polyglot-services-lane.template.md 1.7 KB
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.
- 2d ago First seen · 230 lines · 175 tokens per session scan A f1a4d12db4fe
tidy is a skill published in the GitHub repository melodic-software/claude-code-plugins (12 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 175 tokens to every session and 5,086 once invoked, about $0.0009 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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