fuck-over-engineering

fuck-over-engineering is a skill for Claude Code from vinta/hal-9000. It costs 85 tokens per session (798 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A code-review guide for finding unnecessary complexity in a repository, folder, or file. It looks for dead code, needless dependencies, duplicated helpers, and abstractions with little value.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to audit a chosen scope, rank what can be deleted or replaced, and identify simpler standard-library, platform, or existing-code solutions.
Why use it?
It helps shorten and simplify a codebase without changing its behavior.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: user-invocable in frontmatter. Also seen: mentions subagents; names the AskUserQuestion tool.

Part of the hal-skills plugin — 12 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to audit a chosen scope, rank what can be deleted or replaced, and identify simpler standard-library, platform, or existing-code solutions.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/vinta/hal-9000/fuck-over-engineering
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 vinta/hal-9000 --skill fuck-over-engineering
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/vinta/hal-9000

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install hal-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 12 skills.

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 fuck-over-engineering

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vinta/hal-9000/fuck-over-engineering.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/vinta/hal-9000/fuck-over-engineering)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/vinta/hal-9000/fuck-over-engineering"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vinta/hal-9000/fuck-over-engineering.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 85 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 798 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
  • 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 $0.00085 $0.00798
Opus 5 $0.00043 $0.00399
Sonnet 5 $0.00017 $0.00160
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00080

Measured 2d ago against content hash 7abf1e7d3058, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

fuck-over-engineering 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.

skills/fuck-over-engineering/SKILL.md · 48 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 48 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Fuck Over-Engineering

Audit the scope for over-engineering and report what to cut, ranked biggest cut first. The best outcome is a shorter codebase with the same behavior. The argument is the scope; without one, the whole tree. Read what the scope holds before judging it, and fan out subagents when it will not fit in context.

Tags

  • delete: dead code, unused flexibility, speculative feature. Nothing replaces it.
  • reuse: bespoke code that a helper already in this codebase, or an installed dependency, already provides. Name the helper or function.
  • stdlib: hand-rolled thing the language's 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.

Hunt

Dependencies the stdlib or platform already covers, single-implementation interfaces, factories with one product, wrappers that only delegate, files exporting one thing, dead flags and config, hand-rolled stdlib, near-duplicates of an existing helper, special-case branches bolted onto shared paths, feature logic living in shared modules.

Evidence

Every finding cites the evidence that makes it a cut: caller count, implementation count, or the stdlib or platform feature and the version that ships it. Count callers through dynamic dispatch, entry points, hooks, and tests, not grep alone. A published package's public export stays at zero in-repo callers. Verify stdlib: and native: claims against current docs (the find-docs skill when present) before asserting them.

A finding removes lines or concepts; moving them between files is a refactor, not a cut. Fewer, bigger cuts beat a long list: a shrink: that saves two lines earns a slot only when it also removes a concept.

Output

One line per finding, numbered, ranked biggest cut first:

N. <tag> <what to cut>. <replacement>. <evidence>. [path:line]

Read the full file on GitHub · 48 lines

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. 2d ago Changed · -7 tokens per session 7abf1e7d3058
  2. 8d ago First seen · 48 lines · 92 tokens per session scan A 5dbf05976d4b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

fuck-over-engineering is a skill published in the GitHub repository vinta/hal-9000 (128 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 85 tokens to every session and 798 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.

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