Ring:planning Codebase Simplification

Dev Simplify — Whole-Codebase Structural Sweep

When to use

• User asks to simplify, flatten, or audit architecture of a whole codebase
• User mentions "too much indirection", "kill shims", "unnecessary abstractions"
• Pre-public application where break-compatibility refactor is cheap
• Post-pivot cleanup: speculative scaffolding accumulated during exploration

Skip when

• Diff review on a feature branch → use ring:reviewing-code
• Standards-conformance refactor → use ring:planning-backend-refactor
• Dead code from a specific change → use ring:dead-code-reviewer in ring:reviewing-code
• Application already has external clients depending on internals

Related

Complementary: ring:reviewing-code, ring:codebase-explorer Similar: ring:planning-backend-refactor, ring:auditing-production-readiness

Core principle: DELETE is the default verdict. An abstraction survives only with concrete evidence of the swap it enables.

Hard Constraint

Default: public APIs MUST NOT break (HTTP routes, SDK surface, webhooks, event contracts).

Supply hard_constraint input to override. Must be declared — never auto-inferred.

Dispatch Protocol

⛔ STOP-CHECK BEFORE DISPATCH

Before emitting any Task call, count the explorers you intend to launch in this turn.

• Count MUST equal 6 (or 5 if branch has no commits ahead of main — Task 5 skipped).
• If your dispatch count diverges → STOP and reconcile against the task table below.
• No substitutions, no omissions.

⛔ MUST NOT trickle-dispatch

All explorers leave in the SAME TURN, before reading any explorer output.

Forbidden sequences:

• Dispatch explorer 1 → read result → dispatch explorer 2
• Dispatch a subset → wait → dispatch the rest
• Dispatch follow-up explorers conditioned on partial output
• Loop sequentially over the task list

If you find yourself about to dispatch an explorer in a turn AFTER any explorer has already returned a result → STOP. You violated parallel dispatch. Report the violation and mark the phase INCOMPLETE rather than completing the trickle.

Self-verify after dispatch

After the dispatch turn, verify all scoped Task calls (6, or 5 if Task 5 skipped) were emitted in that single turn. If fewer went out than scoped, the phase did NOT execute correctly. Mark INCOMPLETE and surface the dispatch failure — do NOT silently continue with a partial pool.

Parallel dispatch — atomic batch

Emit all scoped Task calls (the count established in the STOP-CHECK above — 6 or 5) in a SINGLE TURN, as one atomic batch.

If your runtime exposes a multi_tool_use.parallel wrapper, use it to dispatch the complete pool in one wrapped invocation. This is the canonical fan-out mechanism on OpenAI-style tool envelopes and on certain Anthropic SDK consumers — naming it explicitly activates parallel emission on runtimes where trickle-dispatch is the default behavior.

If your runtime emits parallel tool_use blocks natively (Claude Code with Claude models), multi_tool_use.parallel may not be needed — but naming it is harmless and serves as an enforcement anchor.

The STOP-CHECK, anti-trickle, and self-verify guards above remain binding regardless of which mechanism your runtime uses.

Dispatch 6 explorer agents in parallel (5 if branch has no commits ahead of main — skip Task 5):

Explorer dispatch contract:

## Target: <absolute path to repo root>
## Your Focus: <smell category from task table above>
## Hard Constraint: {hard_constraint}
## Output: Write to /tmp/simplify-{task}-findings.json
Schema: { task, findings: [{name, file_line, smell, rebuttal_if_any, blast_radius, public_api_impact, action}], cascade_chains: [...] }

Abstraction Smell Rubric

Accepted evidence to KEEP (must name concretely, not hypothetically):

• Second implementation exists today in this repo
• Swappability exercised in tests with divergent behavior
• Cross-process or cross-language boundary
• Regulatory or contractual requirement

Phase 4: Consolidated Report

Dispatch synthesizer to read all explorer files and emit:

1. docs/ring:planning-codebase-simplification/simplify-report-{timestamp}.md — KILL / REVIEW / KEEP tables
2. docs/ring:planning-codebase-simplification/simplify-tasks-{timestamp}.json — ring:running-dev-cycle task array

MUST emit both artifacts. MUST include cascade chains decomposed into per-ring tasks with depends_on wiring.

Output Format

## Simplify Summary
- Scope / Hard Constraint / Generated
- Kill list: N items | Review list: N items | Keep list: N items

## Hard Constraint
- Declared constraint + load-bearing surface location

## Kill List
| Name | file:line | Smell | Blast radius | Action | Acceptance Criteria |

## Review List
| Name | file:line | Smell | Why uncertain | Recommended next step |

## Keep List
| Name | file:line | Smell resembled | Evidence |

## Cascade Chains
| Chain ID | Leaf | Ring depth | Terminal type | Collapse blast radius |

## Cascade Execution Plan
Per-chain DAG: ring-1 (leaf) → ring-N, each with depends_on wiring

## Remaining Risks
| Risk ID | Related findings | Risk type | Mitigation |

Task JSON Schema

{
  "tasks": [{
    "id": "simplify-001",
    "title": "",
    "severity": "KILL | REVIEW",
    "smell_category": "unexercised-seam | speculative-construction | translation-layer | topology | cascade | branch-slop",
    "files_affected": [],
    "blast_radius": {"files": 0, "lines": 0},
    "acceptance_criteria": [],
    "estimated_complexity": "trivial | moderate | complex",
    "depends_on": [],
    "rebuttal_if_kept": null
  }]
}

Cascade chains → N tasks with depends_on wiring (leaf = ring-1, depends_on: []).