taste-check_skill

Overview

This skill reviews code using Linus Torvalds' "good taste" philosophy to find defensive patterns, special cases, deep nesting, and other code smells. It provides a compact taste score, highlights fatal issues, lists code smells, and gives concrete refactor suggestions with before/after examples. Use it to harden code quality, simplify logic, and prioritize refactors.

How this skill works

I inspect the provided files, diffs, or pasted snippets and run a checklist based on ten taste principles: trust upstream data, eliminate special cases, avoid post-return mutation, ban ad-hoc string concatenation, enforce single responsibility, limit nesting, extract pure functions, validate early, fail fast, and delete dead code. The output is a structured review with a taste score, top problems, detailed code-smell checklist, prioritized fixes, and concrete code examples for remediation.

When to use it

• Code review for quality and maintainability
• Refactoring candidate assessment
• Checking PR diffs for new code smells
• Validating architecture and data flow assumptions
• Teaching teams a stricter taste-driven standard

Best practices

• Trust upstream data; validate once at the boundary and avoid downstream defensive defaults
• Prefer early return and small pure functions to keep nesting shallow
• Return fully-formed results; avoid modifying returned objects after the fact
• Assemble strings/CSS in one place; avoid incremental concatenation across code paths
• Keep functions focused (ideally <50 lines); split responsibilities into testable pure functions
• Fail fast on invalid data instead of hiding issues with fallbacks or try-catch

Example use cases

• Review a single file or module for multiple code smells and get exact refactor steps
• Analyze a git diff to decide whether recent changes introduced defensive code or special-case hacks
• Inspect pasted code snippets to produce quick before/after rewrites and a taste score
• Prioritize technical debt: produce a short ranked list of refactors for immediate action
• Audit string-building or CSS generation logic to centralize and eliminate concatenation