Add skylos tool for dead code detection and security

[duriantaco]

Project

Skylos

Checklist

• One project per PR
• PR title format: Add project-name
• Entry format: * [project-name](url) - Description ending with period.
• Description is concise and short

Why This Project Is Awesome

Which criterion does it meet? (pick one)

• Industry Standard - The go-to tool for a specific use case
• Rising Star - 5000+ stars in < 2 years, significant adoption
• Hidden Gem - Exceptional quality, solves niche problems elegantly

Explain:
Skylos is a framework-aware alternative to Vulture (already listed). We benchmarked both tools on 9 of the most popular Python repositories on GitHub (350k+ combined stars) with every finding

How It Differs

The key difference is framework awareness. Vulture flags Django views, FastAPI endpoints, Pydantic model fields, and pytest fixtures as dead code because it doesn't understand framework magic. Skylos recognizes these patterns and skips them, which is why it has 3x fewer false positives.

Beyond dead code, Skylos also does taint-based security analysis, something Vulture does not do.

• 323+ GitHub stars, actively maintained, commits within last week
• 10 months old with consistent activity
• Full benchmark methodology and reproducible results: https://github.com/duriantaco/skylos-demo
• CI/CD GitHub Action, VS Code extension, MCP server for AI agents

[omarmodhet-lab]

jjj

[JinyangWang27]

@duriantaco Thanks for the submission. Skylos covers interesting ground, but it's quite broad in scope — dead code, SAST, LLM agents, TypeScript/Go support, and a cloud dashboard — making it hard to place cleanly in the list. The core Python dead code detection overlaps significantly with vulture already listed, and the commercial/SaaS aspects of the pro tier give us pause. Closing for now, but feel free to discuss if you think there's a more specific fit.

[duriantaco]

hey @JinyangWang27 , thanks for the thoughtful review! That’s a completely fair feedback and I agree Skylos might be broader in scope than a typical awesome-python entry. Yeap there'll be some overlaps with Vulture or any other dead code detector. Although like 95% of the project is written in Python, we’re intentionally building it toward a wider multi-language direction over time although our main focus is still currently Python.

Really appreciate you taking the time to review it. Cheers and have a great week ahead.

[codybarrett108-pixel]

Thanks for sharing this

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On Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 10:58 PM oha ***@***.***> wrote: *duriantaco* left a comment (vinta/awesome-python#2942) <#2942 (comment)> hey @JinyangWang27 <https://github.com/JinyangWang27> , thanks for the thoughtful review! That’s a completely fair feedback and I agree Skylos might be broader in scope than a typical awesome-python entry. Yeap there'll be some overlaps with Vulture or any other dead code detector. Although like 95% of the project is written in Python, we’re intentionally building it toward a wider multi-language direction over time although our main focus is still currently Python. Really appreciate you taking the time to review it. Cheers and have a great week ahead. — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#2942 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/B7HX4LR2UAONONPOEYA6LK34RDEPLAVCNFSM6AAAAACWHKHGISVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43OSLTON2WKQ3PNVWWK3TUHM2DANZSGE3TCNJVGE> . You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread.Message ID: ***@***.***>