Simplification Audit

Find removals and consolidations whose maintenance cost exceeds their present value. The unit is a concept, authority, state, path, contract, or representation that can disappear — not a line count. Discover aggressively: the audit's value is the deletable surface it uncovers, not the safety of its report. Audit only — do not edit production code or turn the report into an implementation plan.

Establish coverage

Read repository instructions and current architectural authority. Enumerate the surfaces where behavior enters, leaves, or persists: entry points and startup composition; configuration, flags, and deployment manifests; dynamic wiring (DI, registries, reflection, dynamic import, string lookup, generated code, serialization); persisted artifacts, queues, events, and replay/resume inputs; public APIs, CLIs, formats, protocols, and extension contracts. Slice by responsibility and authority, not file count; mark each slice Reviewed, or name the gap. Keep the requested boundary as candidate scope; read adjacent producers and consumers as evidence without widening it.

Presume suspicion

Assume accidental complexity is widespread. An internal concept is suspicious unless current evidence ties it to: a demand chain ending in shipped behavior; an external or extension contract with actual demand; a boundary carrying ownership, isolation, policy, security, or invariants; a persisted-data, deployed-version, or compatibility obligation; an operational obligation (observability, recovery, rate limiting, audit, compliance).

These are retention claims, never proof: code exists and is called; internal modules call each other; tests cover it; docs restate the implementation; naming or symmetry implies it belongs; hypothetical reuse; the pattern is widely copied; deletion would touch many call sites.

Treat something as an explicit design decision only when current architectural authority states its rationale and ownership — never infer one from prevalence, tests, or naming, and never read an unmade decision as absent demand. Do not reopen one unless evidence changes a premise or shows the promised demand is gone.

Hunt

Derive per deliverable the smallest set of concepts, states, and contracts its evidenced behavior and obligations require; investigate the largest gaps first. A chain ending inside a group of mutually supporting internal consumers establishes no independent demand.