A Claude Code plugin for iteratively reducing coupling, in any repository, at any altitude. One skill, one standing question: which dependency here transmits the most unnecessary change, and what is the smallest mechanism that stops the transmission? Each run takes one verified, budgeted bite and records the rest, so coupling goes down monotonically across runs instead of one heroic rewrite.
| Skill | What it does |
|---|---|
/coupling:reduce |
Scan for change-transmitting coupling, verify findings, apply a safe budgeted batch, route structural candidates, and resume from a durable ledger |
Findings are typed, not vibes-based: every one is a directed edge
(A --(kind, via mechanism)--> B) classified on the structured-design strength ladder
(content, common, external, control, stamp, data, message) and the connascence axes
(strength × degree × locality), then weighted by volatility. Coupling to something that
never changes costs nothing, so co-change evidence from version-control history outranks
static impressions. The same model covers four altitudes: documents (duplicated facts, deep
references), code modules (internals reaching, dependency direction), applications (shared
databases, implicit contracts, temporal coupling), and repositories (copied content,
depending on another repo's internals instead of its releases).
Two lanes keep the skill honest:
- Apply lane. Mechanical, contained, behavior-preserving reductions, applied under a scope budget and verified against the project's own build and tests.
- Route lane. Cross-file and architectural findings are surfaced and routed to humans and design tooling, never auto-applied.
The remediation catalog carries an explicit counterweight per mechanism: decoupling's own failure mode is speculative abstraction. An interface with one implementation, or an event bus for a one-to-one call, is refused.
/coupling:reduce # full pass over an inferred scope
/coupling:reduce src/billing # narrowed to a path
/coupling:reduce dry-run docs # findings and ledger only, no edits
/coupling:reduce status # what is open, applied, routed, and recommended next
/coupling:reduce change old new # every site stating a changed value, classified, no edits
/coupling:reduce change apply old new # the same, then change the confirmed setup siteschange is the reactive side of the same model. A value stated in N places is connascence of
value; when that value changes, the skill finds every spelling of it, sorts each site into setup
(examples, help text, defaults: change it and make it point at the owner), record (history: leave
it), contract (approved plans and specs: propose a correction), fixture (ask a person),
generated (change the generator), protected (CI, settings, hooks, lint configs, lock files, migrations:
route to a person), or unknown (a file kind the script does not recognize: read it first), and
edits only after confirmation.
- Your standards win. At orientation the skill discovers the consuming repo's own review criteria and engineering conventions (a review-criteria file, a conventions or standards directory, CLAUDE.md rules) and aligns finding vocabulary and severity with them; the bundled model is the fallback, never an override.
- Ledger placement follows the marketplace topic-docs convention: memory tier, default
.work/<topic-slug>/coupling-ledger.md, never committed. Deltas inreference/topic-docs.md. - Optional collaborators (
architecture,work-items,toolchain,source-control,docs-hygiene) are presence-gated with documented fallbacks; the skill works alone.
/plugin marketplace add melodic-software/claude-code-plugins
/plugin install coupling@melodic-softwareMIT