simplify_skill

Overview

This skill performs a Radical Simplicity Audit to help you strip an idea, product, architecture, prompt, or document down to its essentials. It identifies what is essential, what is superfluous, and produces atomic decisions you can approve or reject. The goal is a clear, actionable plan to reduce complexity without making open-ended changes.

How this skill works

First, the skill asks you to define the artifact type and what "functional" means for it. It then summarizes the artifact in one sentence, isolates essential elements, and lists non-essential items. The output is a verdict (SIMPLE / OVERENGINEERED / UNCLEAR), followed by ordered, reversible decisions you can approve or reject.

When to use it

• You need to simplify a product, feature, or roadmap before development.
• You want a concise assessment of an architecture or system design.
• You want to reduce a prompt or template for more reliable LLM behavior.
• You need to trim documentation to the parts that change reader understanding.
• You want to decide what to cut in a release to meet schedule or scope.

Best practices

• Always state the artifact type and a clear definition of "functional" before the audit.
• Be prepared to justify why each retained element is essential to the one-sentence purpose.
• Limit decisions to atomic changes that can be answered YES / NO / DEFER quickly.
• Call out optics, premature modularity, or ambition that exceeds clarity as bloat signals.
• Aim to propose cuts of 30–50% by ordering items by leverage, not by preference.

Example use cases

• Audit a microservice architecture to identify premature abstractions and nonessential endpoints.
• Simplify a product spec or roadmap to core user journeys for an MVP.
• Reduce a prompt that is producing inconsistent LLM outputs by removing nonfunctional instructions.
• Trim a README or onboarding doc to the sentences that change user understanding.
• Decide which features to defer when compressing scope for a near-term release.