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Codebase archeology

Skill batteryshark/skill-tap/skills/development/codebase-archeology

Portable, reusable skills for agents and everyday workflows. Clank responsibly.

Install
npx -y skills add batteryshark/skill-tap --skill codebase-archeology

Assembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.

2 things to look at

  • 26 days oldThe repository was created 26 days ago. New is not bad, but a brand new repository carrying a familiar-sounding name is the shape a typosquat arrives in, and there has been no time for anyone else to find a problem with it.
  • 1 stars1 stars. Stars are a popularity signal and not a quality one, but at this level it is likely that nobody has read this closely except its author, and you would be relying on your own review.

What its author says it does

Copied from the file, not written here

Investigate and preserve archived, inherited, abandoned, or poorly understood codebases by mapping project variants, toolchains, build assumptions, duplicate artifacts, historical value, and modernization options. Use for legacy project intake, repository preservation, compatibility work, build recovery, false-start comparison, or deciding what should be kept, merged, archived, or retired.

SKILL.md

2.7 KB, as published. Nobody here has run it

Codebase archeology

Turn an old or messy project collection into a defensible preservation decision without destroying evidence or rewriting history prematurely.

Workflow

  1. Confirm the target and start read-only.
  2. Run bin/codebase-archeology <target> to inventory languages, manifests, archives, binary artifacts, and exact duplicate candidates.
  3. Map entry points, build systems, source roots, tests, platform assumptions, third-party code, generated output, experiments, forks, and neighboring project variants.
  4. Classify each meaningful unit with references/classification-rubric.md: active candidate, reference, merge/deduplicate, preserved artifact, or retire candidate.
  5. Produce a working map that separates observation, inference, and author confirmation. Treat it as scratch unless the user asks for a durable report.
  6. If curation is authorized, follow references/preservation-workflow.md. Preserve behavior and provenance before modernization.
  7. Validate build or runtime claims in the narrowest available environment. Distinguish reproduced behavior from plausible reconstruction.

Rules

  • Never delete, quarantine, rewrite, format, or initialize version control during discovery.
  • Hash equality proves identical bytes; similar names, sizes, or structures are only comparison leads.
  • Keep original artifacts when their historical or evidentiary value matters, even if a modern rewrite becomes the maintained path.
  • Separate first-party work from vendored dependencies, generated outputs, archives, binaries, and unrelated clutter.
  • Prefer relative paths in durable documentation. Absolute paths belong only in transient environment diagnostics.
  • Do not assume an obsolete language or build system should be rewritten. State preservation, emulation, porting, and rewrite tradeoffs.
  • Require explicit approval before destructive cleanup or moves that can break external references.

Report

State target, project map, classifications, exact duplicates, likely relationships, reproduced build/runtime evidence, preservation recommendation, and decisions requiring the owner.

Use agents/investigator.md for a read-only mapping pass and agents/validator.md to challenge preservation conclusions.

Keep looking

Skills are one crate of 328,083. Ordering is by how many stacks a row turns up in, so the top of any crate is what has actually been picked rather than what has the most stars.