Cleanup

Use this skill inside Codex when the core behavior is understood but the artifact still needs simplification, deslop work, or clearer prose. cleanup is a non-gating helper skill.

Output

Produce:

• removable complexity or noisy wording
• behavior-preserving simplifications
• residual risks after cleanup
• exact next trigger, usually the owning lane or release verification

Rules

• Prefer deletion over addition.
• Preserve behavior and decision ownership while cleaning up.
• Keep user-facing wording concise and product-native.
• Use references/style-and-deslop.md for simplification and prose cleanup patterns.

Procedure

1. Identify the recently changed surface and lock its current behavior with focused checks.
2. Remove duplication, dead paths, vague wording, and unnecessary abstraction one category at a time.
3. Preserve public names, file ownership, safety boundaries, and release semantics.
4. Re-run the targeted checks plus the smallest relevant lint, typecheck, or build command.
5. Report what was removed, what behavior was preserved, and any residual risk.

Quality bar

• Cleanup reduces concepts or branching rather than adding a second abstraction layer.
• Every deletion is justified by existing behavior or an explicit requirement.
• Formatting-only changes do not obscure functional changes.

Example

When a docs page has repeated callout markup, reuse the existing component and fix its contract instead of introducing another one-off variant.