Audit necessity
Agent skills for agentic coding tools. Extremely opinionated. Updated (almost) daily.
npx -y skills add JHostalek/dotclaude --skill audit-necessityAssembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.
One thing to look at
- 10 stars10 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
Use when cutting code in a folder that doesn't earn its keep — whether a solution is over-engineered, where maintenance cost can be reduced, or where a feature should be removed entirely.
SKILL.md
2.2 KB, as published. Nobody here has run it
!cat "${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/../audit-workflow.md"
Necessity dimension: should this code exist at all, and if so, at this size? Three lenses:
- YAGNI — code solving a problem nobody has: features w/o users, speculative architecture (single-impl interfaces, one-plugin plugin systems), premature generalization, future-proofing tax.
- Cost — maintenance burden vs value delivered. Ratio is the finding, never numerator alone: high-cost/low-value = target; high-cost/high-value on hot path = justified.
- Alternatives — specific library, platform feature, simpler architecture, or "just don't". Name the library; "there's probably a library" is not a finding. 80%-coverage library = rewrite-with-a-dependency, not a drop-in.
Grade each candidate KEEP or CUT. A CUT must cite evidence (file / line-count / usage), be proportionate (500-line abstraction wrapping 10-line op qualifies; 30-line utility does not), and price migration cost when replacement is proposed — every replace-with-library recommendation costs API surface, test rewrites, behavior differences. Code necessary but slightly shorter is refactoring, not this dimension. Most well-maintained codebases grade more KEEP than CUT; an all-CUT list means the grading pass didn't run.
auto-fix = cost clearly exceeds value w/ no user-facing capability lost (dead code, unused abstraction, internal helper), or justified feature whose implementation is 3-10x larger than needed w/ behavior preserved. Fix imports after cutting.
sign-off = removes endpoint, tool, CLI command, public API, or callable feature (external usage unverifiable from inside), or unclear whether code earns its keep — state the specific question. Include the estimated LOC cut.
Domain-specific abstractions (workflow engines, rule systems, protocol handlers) read as speculative architecture to a generalist; code serving a domain you don't fully understand → sign-off as a question, don't cut.