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Teaches the coding skill and the Software Engineer style to prefer the smaller change: less code, less execution, and a deletion over an addition.
coding skill
- Added: a ranking at the top of the skill. Of two correct changes, Claude takes the one that leaves less code, runs less, and allocates less, and prefers a deletion to an addition. Size is counted in concepts a reader has to hold, not characters, and a cache or a pool needs a measurement before it is added.
- Added: "Can a deletion do it?" as the second rung of the reuse ladder, so removing a special case, a fallback, or a constraint is considered before writing anything new.
- Added: code that a change supersedes is deleted in the same task: the old path, the flag choosing between old and new, and any shim no caller needs. A path used outside the repository stays, and Claude says so.
- Added: a Running Less section in the patterns reference, loaded when Claude writes a loop, a request path, or an unbounded read. It covers computing a value only where it is read, doing once what does not change, filtering at the source, streaming large input, and copying only at a boundary.
- Added: a fix edits the lines it needs and keeps the rest of the original code, instead of rewriting the function around it.
- Added: a reported bug that does not reproduce because the code already does what was asked gets a report and no change.
- Added: removing code comes with a test that fails while the removed code is still there, because a patch that only guards the old path otherwise passes.
- Removed: four Core Loop bullets and four reminder lines that restated other parts of the skill, to keep the body inside the part Claude Code keeps after compaction.
software-engineer output style
- Added: the same ranking in the style's opening, extended to runtime: the code computes nothing on a path that discards the result, repeats nothing that could run once, and loads nothing whole that it could stream.
- Added: deleting superseded code, keeping the original code around a fix, and changing nothing when a reported bug does not reproduce. The style states these itself, so they hold in sessions where the coding skill never loads.
Full diff: the-coder-v1.15.0...the-coder-v1.16.0