De-complect: Skill to remove braided complexity from projects

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.

An Agent Skill that helps AI coding agents remove braided complexity from design documents and implementation branches — the way Rich Hickey's Simple Made Easy means simple: one fold, un-braided, not "familiar" or "fewer files." This 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. It runs on two kinds of target: A design document plan, ADR, spec, handoff doc — the deliverable is a disentangled rewrite to a sibling <basename .simplified.md , 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. This is a quality pass, not a bug hunt. It preserves the document's intent and scope, and preserves code behavior; genuine correctness bugs are surfaced separately, never fixed here. curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/danverbraganza/de-complect/main/install.sh | bash This downloads the skill into ~/.claude/skills/de-complect/ . Override the destination with CLAUDE SKILLS DIR . With just https://just.systems just install With a skill manager agent-skills-manager https://github.com/umutbozdag/agent-skills-manager / asm / sm The skill follows the standard skills/<name /SKILL.md layout, so skill managers discover it straight from the repo: asm github.com/luongnv89/asm asm install github:danverbraganza/de-complect -p claude sm pypi.org/project/agent-skill-manager sm install https://github.com/danverbraganza/de-complect -a claude-code For the agent-skills-manager dashboard, open Install → From Git and paste https://github.com/danverbraganza/de-complect , then pick de-complect . The repo doubles as its own single-plugin marketplace. From inside Claude Code: /plugin marketplace add danverbraganza/de-complect /plugin install de-complect@de-complect-marketplace Then reload /reload-plugins and invoke the skill with /de-complect:de-complect . Copy the skill directory into your skills directory — either global: cp -r skills/de-complect/ ~/.claude/skills/de-complect/ or into a single project: cp -r skills/de-complect/ /path/to/your/project/.claude/skills/de-complect/ Once 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. skills/ └── de-complect/ └── SKILL.md The de-complect pass: radar, razors, process, and self-check gates 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. Contributions are welcome. Keep the skill a quality pass — disentangling, behavior-preserving — and route correctness findings to a dedicated bug-hunting review. MIT