Simplify the responsibility

Choose a concrete reduction in maintenance cost: remove a dead path, unnecessary wrapper, repeated work, or dependency. Preserve behavior, failure paths, ownership, and dependency direction. Fewer lines alone are not an improvement.

Extract duplication only when callers share a stable responsibility. Prefer existing primitives to speculative abstractions; do not trade readable code for compressed syntax or hidden complexity.

For an internal interface replacement, migrate known callers, tests, and affected documentation together, then remove superseded code. Keep a compatibility path only for an identified unmigrated consumer, with a reason and removal condition. External interfaces and persisted data need an explicit migration strategy.

Verify observable behavior, error paths, and a migrated caller using the owning checks. Distinguish baseline failures from regressions. Do not weaken validation or assertions to make the smaller implementation pass. Measure performance claims; label unmeasured benefits as expectations.

Stop when the requested simplification is checked or no worthwhile change remains, within the agreed budget. Do not invent an iteration quota. Repair only your own unsuccessful edits and preserve unrelated work. Refactoring does not authorize data destruction, deployment, or host activation.