Dark mode switch icon Light mode switch icon

🔨 Building

minimise-complexity: a Claude Code skill for keeping code simple

1 min read

Agents are great at writing code, and especially good at small, well-scoped tasks. The catch is they tend to focus on the task right in front of them, not the wider system or how maintainable it will be in a year. They’re good at adding things and not so good at simplifying, so they happily pile on complexity we have to live with later.

minimise-complexity is a Claude Code skill that gives the agent a lens for keeping things simple, both when designing something and when reviewing a change. It pulls together two sources I really like: The Grug Brained Developer and John Ousterhout’s A Philosophy of Software Design. Both make the same argument — complexity is the enemy — so the skill nudges towards the simpler 80/20 option and flags things like shallow abstractions and over-DRYing.

Code is on GitHub.

Originally published on by Larry Hudson