complexity-cuts — Lower Big-O on Existing Code

lemmaly prevents bad complexity before code is written. complexity-cuts fixes it after the fact: code already exists, it works, but its time or space complexity is worse than necessary.

Violating the letter of these rules is violating the spirit of the skill. Adapting "just a little" is how a faster-but-wrong rewrite ships.

When to Use This Skill

Use complexity-cuts when refactoring existing code that has poor Big-O:

• Nested loops, O(n²) or worse scans, repeated work, redundant allocations, blown memory.
• Stated symptoms: "this is slow on large inputs", "times out", "OOM", "too much memory", "reduce complexity", "optimize this algorithm".
• N+1 query patterns in ORMs (Prisma, Drizzle, SQLAlchemy, Django, ActiveRecord).
• await inside for over independent items causing serial latency.

For preventing bad complexity before code is written, use lemmaly. For math-level optimizations (Bloom, HLL, FFT, JL projection), escalate to mathguard.

The Iron Law