code-refiner

A structured, multi-pass code refinement skill that transforms complex, verbose, or tangled code into clean, idiomatic, maintainable implementations — without changing what the code does.

The goal is not fewer lines. The goal is code that a tired engineer at 2am can read, understand, and safely modify. Every change must pass three tests:

When clarity and brevity conflict, clarity wins. When idiom and explicitness conflict, consider the team's experience level. When DRY and locality conflict, prefer locality for code read more than modified.

Deep code simplification, refactoring, and quality refinement. Analyzes structural complexity, anti-patterns, and readability debt, then applies targeted refactoring preserving exact behavior. Language-agnostic: Python, Go, TypeScript/JavaScript, Rust. Use this skill when the goal is simplification and clarity rather than bug-finding. Triggers on: "simplify this code", "clean up my code", "refactor for clarity", "reduce complexity", "make this more readable", "code quality pass", "tech debt cleanup", "run the code refiner", "simplify recent changes", "this code is messy", "too much nesting", "this function is too long", "clean this up before I PR it", "tidy up my code", cyclomatic complexity, cognitive complexity, code smells. Source: mathews-tom/praxis-skills.