{"id":18110,"plugin_id":"plugins_6a85a87df50c8191bd7f010bb7b17794","kind":"skill","collection_source":null,"comparison_source":null,"observed_at":"2026-09-30T23:14:37.689Z","digest":"da0a8698817f794507b50e0d3d76a492dca0b4d31ec63b4a7ecc4b887d84f86d","against":null,"payload":{"description":"Apply when reviewing or shaping code that's hard to trace. Count layers between question and answer, and hidden state in the reader's head; collapse one-caller wrappers and shrink mutable scope.","included_files":[],"name":"principle-minimize-reader-load","skill_md_contents":"---\nname: principle-minimize-reader-load\ndescription: \"Apply when reviewing or shaping code that's hard to trace. Count layers between question and answer, and hidden state in the reader's head; collapse one-caller wrappers and shrink mutable scope.\"\ndisable-model-invocation: true\n---\n\n# Minimize Reader Load\n\nMaintainability is the work a reader must do to understand code. Track two axes:\n1. **Layers to trace.** How many indirections sit between the question and the answer.\n2. **State to hold.** How much hidden or mutable context the reader must keep in their head.\n\n**Why:** Code is read far more than it is written. LOC, cyclomatic complexity, and \"clean architecture\" are proxies. Reader load is the thing that matters. The two axes are independent. A flat file with 50 globals can be as hard to reason about as a 6-layer adapter stack. Guard both. This is the human analog of [Guard the Context Window](../principle-guard-the-context-window/SKILL.md): working memory is finite for readers too.\n\n**The pattern:**\n- **Collapse layers** that do not earn their keep: wrappers with one caller, adapters with no second implementation, indirection introduced for a future that never came. Inline them.\n- **Make adjacent layers change the abstraction.** A layer that repeats the same methods and arguments adds reader load without compression. Collapse pass-through layers.\n- **Demand interface compression.** A broad interface that hides little complexity makes readers learn both the surface and the implementation. Prefer boundaries that hide meaningful decisions.\n- **Shrink state scope:** prefer pure functions (returns over mutations), locals over fields, fields over module state, and module state over globals. Derive instead of sync.\n- **Name the invariant at the boundary,** not in every consumer, so the reader learns it once.\n- Before adding a layer or a piece of state, ask: does this reduce reader load somewhere else by at least as much?\n\n**The test:** Can a new reader answer \"where does X come from?\" and \"what can change X?\" in under 30 seconds? If not, cut layers or cut state.\n"},"changes":[],"summary":"First saved snapshot. No earlier version is available for comparison.","summary_kind":"deterministic","summary_metadata":{}}