needless-review

needless-review is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from siddhamapple/needless. It costs 98 tokens per session (555 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A code-review skill focused on finding unnecessary complexity. It reports what to remove or replace with simpler code.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to review a diff for over-engineering and receive concise findings with file locations and simpler replacements.
Why use it?
It helps make a codebase smaller by identifying dead code, duplicate built-in functionality, unused flexibility, and speculative design.

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/siddhamapple/needless/needless-review
Any agent
npx skills add siddhamapple/needless --skill needless-review
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/siddhamapple/needless

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 needless-review

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/siddhamapple/needless/needless-review.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/siddhamapple/needless/needless-review)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/siddhamapple/needless/needless-review"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/siddhamapple/needless/needless-review.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 98 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 555 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 $0.00098 $0.00555
Opus 5 $0.00049 $0.00278
Sonnet 5 $0.00020 $0.00111
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00056

Measured 4d ago against content hash 2a729d8573c0, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

needless-review 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 4d 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.

skills/needless-review/SKILL.md · 56 lines

What it actually says

Review diffs for unnecessary complexity. One line per finding: location, what to cut, what replaces it. The diff's best outcome is getting shorter.

Format

L<line>: <tag> <what>. <replacement>., or <file>:L<line>: ... for multi-file diffs.

Tags:

  • delete: dead code, unused flexibility, speculative feature. Replacement: nothing.
  • stdlib: hand-rolled thing the standard library ships. Name the function.
  • native: dependency or code doing what the platform already does. Name the feature.
  • yagni: abstraction with one implementation, config nobody sets, layer with one caller.
  • shrink: same logic, fewer lines. Show the shorter form.

Examples

Bad: "This EmailValidator class might be more complex than necessary, have you considered whether all these validation rules are needed at this stage?"

Good: L12-38: stdlib: 27-line validator class. "@" in email, 1 line, real validation is the confirmation mail.

Good: L4: native: moment.js imported for one format call. Intl.DateTimeFormat, 0 deps.

Good: repo.py:L88: yagni: AbstractRepository with one implementation. Inline it until a second one exists.

Good: L52-71: delete: retry wrapper around an idempotent local call. Nothing replaces it.

Good: L30-44: shrink: manual loop builds dict. dict(zip(keys, values)), 1 line.

Scoring

End with the only metric that matters: net: -<N> lines possible.

If there is nothing to cut: Lean already. Ship.

Boundaries

Complexity only. Correctness bugs, security holes, and performance go to a normal review pass. A single smoke test or assert-based self-check is the needless minimum -- never flag it for deletion. Does not apply the fixes, only lists them. "stop needless-review" or "normal mode": revert to verbose style.

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. 4d ago First seen · 56 lines · 98 tokens per session scan A 2a729d8573c0

Subscribe to this mod's changes

needless-review is a skill published in the GitHub repository siddhamapple/needless (2 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 98 tokens to every session and 555 once invoked, about $0.0005 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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