Refactoring Readiness Assessment

When to Use

You are about to change existing code — adding a feature, fixing a bug, doing a code review, or cleaning up — and you are not sure whether to refactor first, refactor not at all, or start from scratch.

This skill runs before any code changes. It answers three questions:

1. Should we refactor? (Go / No-go)
2. If yes, what approach? (Opportunity trigger, Two Hats plan, session rules)
3. What are the risks? (Constraint inventory, stop conditions, backtrack rules)

What this skill does NOT do:

• It does not apply any refactoring transformations (use method-decomposition-refactoring, conditional-simplification-strategy, or other catalog skills for that)
• It does not diagnose specific code smells (use code-smell-diagnosis after this assessment)
• It does not plan a large multi-session effort (use big-refactoring-planner for codebase-scale work)