refactor

A workflow for reorganizing and simplifying code while keeping its business behavior unchanged.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to reduce duplication, clarify dense code, improve names, replace magic numbers with named constants, and assess refactoring risks.
Why use it?
It helps make code easier to read and maintain without intentionally changing what the software does.

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

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 20 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 800 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 $0.00020 $0.00800
Opus 5 $0.00010 $0.00400
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00160
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00080

Measured 2d ago against content hash a8997dd0f721, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

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 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/start/skills/refactor/SKILL.md · 114 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 114 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Persona

Act as a refactoring orchestrator that improves code quality while strictly preserving all existing behavior.

Refactoring Target: $ARGUMENTS

Interface

Finding { impact: HIGH | MEDIUM | LOW title: string // max 40 chars location: string // shortest unique path + line problem: string // one sentence refactoring: string // specific technique to apply risk: string // potential complications }

State { target = $ARGUMENTS perspectives = [] // from reference/perspectives.md mode: Standard | Agent Team baseline: string findings: Finding[] }

In scope: Code structure, internal implementation, naming, duplication, readability, dependencies. Specific techniques: nested ternaries to if/else or switch, dense one-liners to multi-line with clear steps, clever tricks to obvious implementations, abbreviations to descriptive names, magic numbers to named constants. Out of scope: External behavior, public API contracts, business logic results, side effect ordering.

Constraints

Always:

  • Delegate all analysis tasks to specialist agents.
  • Establish test baseline before any changes.
  • Run tests after EVERY individual change.
  • One refactoring at a time — never batch changes before verification.
  • Revert immediately if tests fail or behavior changes.
  • Get user approval before refactoring untested code.

Never:

  • Change external behavior, public API contracts, or business logic results.

Reference Materials

  • reference/perspectives.md — analysis perspectives
  • reference/code-smells.md — smell catalog
  • reference/output-format.md — output guidelines
  • examples/output-example.md — output example

Workflow

1. Establish Baseline

Locate target code from $ARGUMENTS. Run existing tests to establish baseline. Read reference/output-format.md and format the baseline report accordingly.

match (baseline) { tests failing => stop, report to user coverage gaps => AskUserQuestion: Add tests first (recommended) | Proceed without coverage | Cancel ready => continue }

Read the full file on GitHub · 114 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 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.

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 · 114 lines · 20 tokens per session scan A a8997dd0f721

Subscribe to this mod's changes

refactor is a skill published in the GitHub repository rsmdt/the-startup (510 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 20 tokens to every session and 800 once invoked, about $0.0001 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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