ln-626-dead-code-auditor_skill

Overview

This skill audits a codebase for dead code and legacy artifacts, producing a scored report and actionable findings. It focuses on unreachable code, unused imports/variables/functions, large commented-out blocks, and backward-compatibility shims. It writes a single report file to the specified output directory and returns a compact summary for pipeline coordination.

How this skill works

The worker parses the coordinator-provided contextStore to locate the repo root and output_dir, then runs static analysis and targeted greps/linters to detect unreachable statements, unused symbols, commented-out code blocks, and legacy compatibility shims. It loads the clean code checklist and scoring formula from shared references, collects findings with severity and remediation effort, calculates a compliance score, builds the full markdown report from the audit template, writes it in one atomic write to {output_dir}/626-dead-code.md, and returns a minimal summary string to the coordinator.

When to use it

• Before a major refactor or API version bump to identify risky backward-compatibility code
• As part of CI/CD quality gates to flag growing dead code and maintenance debt
• During codebase health audits to quantify unused symbols and unreachable paths
• When preparing release notes or breaking-change communications to locate shims and deprecated exports
• Before trimming dependencies or performing security/hardening exercises

Best practices

• Do not auto-fix: produce findings and recommendations; let maintainers apply changes
• Exclude generated files, vendor directories, migration scripts, and test fixtures from analysis
• Use git history and tags to confidently remove code; prefer deletion over commented-out preservation
• Classify legacy shims by age and impact; prioritize removal in critical paths (auth, payments)
• Provide effort estimates (S/M/L) to help plan remediation work

Example use cases

• Run in the ln-620 coordinator pipeline to produce a dead-code audit report for a release candidate
• Scan a monorepo to find unused exports and unused-module cruft before dependency pruning
• Identify large commented-out blocks and recommend safe deletion backed by git history
• Locate backward-compatibility wrappers that block API cleanup and quantify remediation effort
• Generate a scored snapshot (X/10) to track technical debt over successive sprints