Code Simplification

When to use

• Improve scoped code clarity without changing behavior.

Not for: refactoring for structural moves; implement for unfinished behavior.

Steps

1. Understand behavior, callers, tests and reasons for the current structure.

2. Find concrete redundancy or indirection; avoid unrelated cleanup.

3. Apply the smallest behavior-preserving change and check affected behavior.

4. Review clarity and invariant preservation; route feature completion to implement rather than treating it as cleanup.

Verify

• Behavior and checks remain unchanged; every edit serves scoped simplification.

References

• engineering-principles.md — shared decision boundaries, scope and verification.
• clean-code.md — meaningful names, small functions, comments, error handling (Uncle Bob)
• references/opportunities.md — full simplification-opportunities tables (structural / naming / redundancy) + language-specific examples (TypeScript, Python, React/JSX)