Codebase Simplification Audit

An evidence-driven skill for finding and safely removing accidental complexity — dead code, duplicate state, redundant layers — within an authorized scope.

Dev & CodingAdvanced★ 92,374⑂ 6,305AI score 8/10Last updated: Oct 31, 2026

What it does

Runs in two authority modes: Survey stays read-only and returns ranked, evidence-backed simplification candidates; Change implements the strongest authorized cut and validates the surviving contract.
Builds a contract map first — tracing entrypoints through configuration, registration, dispatch, persistence, processes, and wire boundaries to surface public APIs, dynamic reachability, stored formats, and compatibility paths.
Requires a proof record per candidate: target, maintenance burden, real consumers, rationale, cut surface, consequence, confidence/risk, the smallest check that would expose a bad cut, and net effect.
Explicitly protects authorization, trust-boundary validation, security isolation, accessibility, data-loss prevention, and stored-format compatibility from incidental "simplification".
Optimizes for fewer concepts and obligations, not fewer lines; concluding that the code is already justified counts as success.

Who it's for

Developers and tech leads deciding what is actually safe to delete in a long-lived legacy codebase
Teams who must prove "nobody uses this" in refactor pull requests
Anyone who also wants invalidated ADRs, RFCs, and design notes reconciled with the change

Examples

"Find unused feature flags and branches in the billing module" → Survey mode returns a consumer map plus ranked deletion candidates and rejected leads.
"Remove the v1 compatibility adapter layer" → Change mode proves the blast radius, then deletes and validates one ownership boundary at a time.
"Are UserState and SessionState duplicates?" → compares synchronization cost against real references and reports whether consolidation is provable or still unresolved.

· · · Install guide · · ·

Try it now, no install

Paste this into Claude to use the skill without installing anything.

Read the instructions in this file and follow them to help me:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tt-a1i/archify/HEAD/.agents/skills/simplify-codebase/SKILL.md

What I want: (describe your task here)

If Claude can't open the link, open it yourself and paste the contents instead.

↓ If it works for you, download the ZIP below and install it. Then it runs on its own — no pasting each time.

Install in the Claude app (no terminal)

Download the ZIP with the button below.
In Claude, open Settings → Capabilities and turn on 'Code execution and file creation'. (one time)
Go to Customize → Skills → + → 'Upload a skill' and upload the ZIP.

↓ Download ZIP

Install in Claude Code

Let Claude do it — paste this into Claude Code

Install the skill I found on AI Skill Mart.
Copy the .agents/skills/simplify-codebase folder from the GitHub repo tt-a1i/archify into my ~/.claude/skills/simplify-codebase/.
When it's done, tell me in one line what this skill can do.

Install with a command instead

git clone https://github.com/tt-a1i/archify /tmp/archify && mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && cp -r /tmp/archify/.agents/skills/simplify-codebase ~/.claude/skills/

⚠ This is a third-party skill. Check the source repository before installing.

Open a terminal.
Clone the repository: git clone https://github.com/tt-a1i/archify /tmp/archify
Create the skills directory: mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
Copy the whole skill folder, including its reference docs: cp -r /tmp/archify/.agents/skills/simplify-codebase ~/.claude/skills/
Verify with ls ~/.claude/skills/simplify-codebase/references that investigation.md and the other reference files came along.
Restart Claude Code, then ask something like "run a simplification audit on this repo" to trigger the skill.
Before allowing real deletions, create a dedicated git branch and tell it your test/verification commands so the validation step is meaningful.

View source on GitHub ↗License: Apache-2.0