refactoring-patterns

A framework for improving code structure through small, named changes while keeping its behaviour the same. Refactoring means changing how code is organised without changing what it does; code smells are warning signs of structural problems.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to address code smells, extract methods, replace complicated conditionals, and make other behaviour-preserving improvements one verified step at a time.
Why use it?
It provides a repeatable way to reduce technical debt, which is the extra work caused by difficult or messy code. Running tests before and after each change helps catch accidental behaviour changes.

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/tmcfarlane/oh-my-cursor/refactoring-patterns
Any agent
npx skills add tmcfarlane/oh-my-cursor --skill refactoring-patterns
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/tmcfarlane/oh-my-cursor

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 79 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,434 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 $0.00079 $0.04434
Opus 5 $0.00039 $0.02217
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00887
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00443

Measured 3d ago against content hash 7e0d40a3f5c2, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

refactoring-patterns 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 3d 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/refactoring-patterns/SKILL.md · 239 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 239 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Refactoring Patterns Framework

A disciplined approach to improving the internal structure of existing code without changing its observable behavior. Apply these named transformations when reviewing code, reducing technical debt, or preparing code for new features. Every refactoring follows the same loop: verify tests pass, apply one small structural change, verify tests still pass.

Core Principle

Refactoring is not rewriting. It is a sequence of small, behavior-preserving transformations, each backed by tests. You never change what the code does -- you change how the code is organized. The discipline of taking tiny verified steps is what makes refactoring safe. Big-bang rewrites fail because they combine structural change with behavioral change, making it impossible to know which broke things.

The foundation: Bad code is not a character flaw -- it is a natural consequence of delivering features under time pressure. Code smells are objective signals that structure has degraded. Named refactorings are the proven mechanical recipes for fixing each smell. The catalog of smells tells you where to look; the catalog of refactorings tells you what to do.

Scoring

Goal: 10/10. When reviewing or refactoring code, rate the structural quality 0-10 based on adherence to the principles below. A 10/10 means: no obvious smells remain, each function does one thing, names reveal intent, duplication is eliminated, and the test suite covers the refactored paths. Always provide the current score and specific refactorings needed to reach 10/10.

The Refactoring Patterns Framework

Six areas of focus for systematically improving code structure:

1. Code Smells as Triggers

Core concept: Code smells are surface indicators of deeper structural problems. They are not bugs -- the code works -- but they signal that the design is making the code harder to understand, extend, or maintain. Each smell maps to one or more named refactorings that fix it.

Why it works: Without a shared vocabulary of smells, code review devolves into subjective "I don't like this." Named smells give teams objective criteria: "This is Feature Envy -- the method uses six fields from another class and only one of its own." The name points directly to the fix.

Read the full file on GitHub · 239 lines

Files

What ships with it

6 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. 3d ago First seen · 239 lines · 79 tokens per session scan A 7e0d40a3f5c2

Subscribe to this mod's changes

refactoring-patterns is a skill published in the GitHub repository tmcfarlane/oh-my-cursor (108 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 79 tokens to every session and 4,434 once invoked, about $0.0004 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.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

systematic-debugging

Use when encountering any bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior, before proposing fixes.

obra/superpowers · 21 tokens

brainstorming

You MUST use this before any creative work - creating features, building components, adding functionality, or modifying behavior. Explores user intent, requirements and design before implementation.

obra/superpowers · 37 tokens

auto-perf-optimize

Run agent-driven VS Code performance or memory investigations. Use when asked to launch Code OSS, automate a VS Code scenario, run the Chat memory smoke runner, capture renderer heap snapshots, take workflow screenshots, compare run summaries, or drive a repeatable scenario before heap-snapshot analysis.

microsoft/vscode · 62 tokens

chat-perf

Run chat perf benchmarks and memory leak checks against the local dev build or any published VS Code version. Use when investigating chat rendering regressions, validating perf-sensitive changes to chat UI, or checking for memory leaks in the chat response pipeline.

microsoft/vscode · 51 tokens

chat-pet-sprite-creation

Use when creating or changing VS Code chat pet sprite art, sprite sheets, state animations, eye treatments, Stable/Insiders variants, or pet transitions under src/vs/workbench/contrib/chat/browser/widget/media/chatPet.

microsoft/vscode · 53 tokens

cpu-profile-analysis

Analyze V8/Chrome CPU profiles (.cpuprofile) and DevTools trace files (Trace-.json). Use when: profiling performance, investigating slow functions, comparing code paths, finding bottlenecks, analyzing timeToRequest, understanding call trees from sampling profiler data, analyzing layout/paint/rendering, investigating…

microsoft/vscode · 71 tokens