{"slug": "de-complect-skill-to-remove-braided-complexity-from-projects", "title": "De-complect: Skill to remove braided complexity from projects", "summary": "Dan VerBragaza released an open-source Agent Skill called 'de-complect' that teaches AI coding agents to remove braided complexity from design documents and implementation branches, following the principles of Rich Hickey's 'Simple Made Easy' talk. The skill, available on GitHub under the MIT license, targets independent concerns twisted together such as defensive checks, sentinels, tri-state configs, and speculative abstraction, and produces behavior-preserving simplifications.", "body_md": "An Agent Skill that helps AI coding agents **remove braided complexity** from design documents and\nimplementation branches — the way Rich Hickey's *Simple Made Easy* means simple: one fold,\nun-braided, not \"familiar\" or \"fewer files.\"\n\nThis repository provides an Agent Skill for Claude Code and other compatible AI agents. It teaches the agent to find where independent concerns are twisted together — defensive checks, sentinels, tri-state configs, scattered validation, speculative abstraction, stored-but-derivable state — and cut those braids so each concern hangs straight down.\n\nIt runs on two kinds of target:\n\n**A design document**(plan, ADR, spec, handoff doc) — the deliverable is a disentangled rewrite to a sibling`<basename>.simplified.md`\n\n, led by a simplification memo.**An implementation branch**— after a feature lands, before merge — the deliverable is a series of small, behavior-preserving cuts, each with a named surviving enforcer for every invariant it removes.\n\nThis is a **quality** pass, not a bug hunt. It preserves the document's intent and scope, and\npreserves code behavior; genuine correctness bugs are surfaced separately, never fixed here.\n\n```\ncurl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/danverbraganza/de-complect/main/install.sh | bash\n```\n\nThis downloads the skill into `~/.claude/skills/de-complect/`\n\n. Override the destination with\n`CLAUDE_SKILLS_DIR`\n\n.\n\n### With [just](https://just.systems)\n\n```\njust install\n```\n\n### With a skill manager ([agent-skills-manager](https://github.com/umutbozdag/agent-skills-manager) / `asm`\n\n/ `sm`\n\n)\n\nThe skill follows the standard `skills/<name>/SKILL.md`\n\nlayout, so skill managers discover it\nstraight from the repo:\n\n```\n# asm (github.com/luongnv89/asm)\nasm install github:danverbraganza/de-complect -p claude\n\n# sm (pypi.org/project/agent-skill-manager)\nsm install https://github.com/danverbraganza/de-complect -a claude-code\n```\n\nFor the agent-skills-manager dashboard, open **Install → From Git** and paste\n`https://github.com/danverbraganza/de-complect`\n\n, then pick `de-complect`\n\n.\n\nThe repo doubles as its own single-plugin marketplace. From inside Claude Code:\n\n```\n/plugin marketplace add danverbraganza/de-complect\n/plugin install de-complect@de-complect-marketplace\n```\n\nThen reload (`/reload-plugins`\n\n) and invoke the skill with `/de-complect:de-complect`\n\n.\n\nCopy the skill directory into your skills directory — either global:\n\n```\ncp -r skills/de-complect/ ~/.claude/skills/de-complect/\n```\n\nor into a single project:\n\n```\ncp -r skills/de-complect/ /path/to/your/project/.claude/skills/de-complect/\n```\n\nOnce installed, the skill activates when you ask an agent to \"simplify\", \"de-complect\", \"untangle\", \"remove cruft\", \"make erroneous states unrepresentable\", or \"clean up\" a design doc or a branch — or when a diff is thick with defensive checks, sentinels, and stored-but-derivable state.\n\n```\nskills/\n└── de-complect/\n    └── SKILL.md    # The de-complect pass: radar, razors, process, and self-check gates\n```\n\n**Simple ≠ easy**— simple is one fold (objective); easy is near-at-hand (relative). Every \"simpler\" claim is interrogated: does it reduce interleaving, or only familiarity and keystrokes?**Judge the artifact, not the construct**— evaluate each braid by its cost to reasoning, change, and debugging, not by whether it looks like a familiar shape.** No named survivor → not redundant → restore it**— every removed guard must name what now enforces its invariant.** Relocation is not removal**— a check moved into a helper still called everywhere is the same braid in a tidier costume.** Clean is a valid result**— report \"clean\" rather than inventing a finding to justify the pass.\n\nContributions are welcome. Keep the skill a **quality** pass — disentangling, behavior-preserving —\nand route correctness findings to a dedicated bug-hunting review.\n\nMIT", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/de-complect-skill-to-remove-braided-complexity-from-projects", "canonical_source": "https://github.com/danverbraganza/de-complect", "published_at": "2026-07-23 01:19:34+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-23 01:52:31.787660+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["developer-tools", "ai-agents", "ai-tools"], "entities": ["Dan VerBragaza", "de-complect", "Rich Hickey", "Simple Made Easy", "Claude Code", "GitHub", "MIT"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/de-complect-skill-to-remove-braided-complexity-from-projects", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/de-complect-skill-to-remove-braided-complexity-from-projects.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/de-complect-skill-to-remove-braided-complexity-from-projects.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/de-complect-skill-to-remove-braided-complexity-from-projects.jsonld"}}