Safe refactor
Portable agent skills for desktop apps, programming, UI, and web design - Codex, Claude, Cursor, Grok. English SKILL.md playbooks (Photino, Inno, CI, landings).
npx -y skills add swd3k/skills --skill safe-refactorAssembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.
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- 19 days oldThe repository was created 19 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.
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What its author says it does
Copied from the file, not written here
Refactor without breaking behavior: characterization tests, small steps, feature flags. Use when cleaning architecture, renaming widely, or extracting services from UI code.
SKILL.md
0.9 KB, as published. Nobody here has run it
Safe Refactor
Rules
- Green before green — tests or manual script pass first.
- Change structure or behavior, not both in one commit.
- Prefer extract method/class over rewrites.
- Keep public behavior identical unless ticket says otherwise.
Steps
- Characterization test around the mess.
- Extract interface at the boundary you need.
- Move implementation; keep façade.
- Delete dead code only after call graph check.
- Run full test suite + smoke the UI path.
Pitfalls
- Drive-by formatting across the repo
- Renaming and logic change together
- "Temporary" dual code paths that become permanent
Acceptance
- Behavior checklist from before still passes
- Diff is reviewable in < ~400 lines per commit when possible
Gives 0 of the 12 instructions most refactoring skills give
Counted across 521 of the 525 authors here whose files we hold, read 2026-08-06
- run tests after each changein 59 of 521, across 56 files
- write tests before refactoringin 27 of 521, across 24 files
- preserve external behaviorin 26 of 521, across 22 files
- remove dead codein 25 of 521, across 24 files
- make small incremental changesin 20 of 521, across 17 files
- break the implementation into tiny commitsin 18 of 521, across 5 files
- ask the user about alternative optionsin 17 of 521, across 4 files
- create a GitHub issue with the planin 17 of 521, across 4 files
- explore the repository to verify assertionsin 17 of 521, across 4 files
- interview the user about the refactorin 16 of 521, across 3 files
- check the codebase for test coveragein 16 of 521, across 3 files
- refactor one thing at a timein 16 of 521, across 12 files
Said here and by no other author read
- prefer extraction over rewrites
- keep public behavior identical
- extract an interface at the boundary
- keep a facade over moved implementation
- check call graph before deleting dead code
- smoke test the UI path
Grouped from the skills themselves: near-identical wordings counted once, and counted by distinct author, so one author publishing three of these counts once.