Individual skill

refactoring-safely

Change the structure of code that already exists without changing what it does: smells as triggers, the named transformations (extract/inline, move feature, organise data, simplify conditionals), and above all the workflow that makes it safe — characterization tests first, one transformation at a time, green between every step. Use when a file or function is already too large; when asked to "split this module", "extract this", "break up main.py", "clean up this legacy code", "reduce coupling here"; when asked to remove dead code, stale feature flags or finished experiments; when a shape advisory fires on a grown file; or before any restructuring of code that has users. Do NOT use to decide the target layout of a NEW project (use architecture-first), for unit-level naming and function quality in code you are writing fresh (use code-complexity), for capacity or storage decisions (use system-and-data-design), or to strip over-engineering on request (use lean-code). This is the transformation with a net; deciding WHERE things should end up is a different question, and doing both at once is how refactors lose behaviour.

skills/development/refactoring-safely/SKILL.md

Source commit 849719987d9c0d6ed973bdbce8ed37b266d3b1f3

What was checked

Matches the observed repository HEAD

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Observed behavior

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Last checked

Nov 7, 2026

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