Code Audit Patterns

Recurring smell categories worth hunting periodically. Each category has a grep pattern, a real example from the repo (if one exists), and a "why it matters" so you know whether a hit is a real smell or expected.

Related skills: See post-implementation-review for the full second-read ritual after implementation. See refactoring for the methodology of fixing what you find. See one-sentence-test for the cohesion audit that frames whether an abstraction earns its keep.

When to Apply This Skill

Use when:

• Doing a periodic code-quality review pass.
• Scoping a cleanup PR.
• After a major refactor, hunting for stale boundaries the new design exposes.
• Reviewing a PR that touches a primitive: these patterns indicate where new contracts may be leaking into consumers.

The categories below were validated against the actual codebase by repeated agent audits. They're not generic style nits: each one signals a specific kind of contract problem in a TypeScript-heavy framework codebase.

1. Duck-Typing at System Boundaries