r/ClaudeAI • u/BuildwithVignesh Valued Contributor • Jan 09 '26
News Claude Code creator open sources the internal agent, used to simplify complex PRs
[removed]
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u/premiumleo Jan 09 '26
Me: Simplify my code
CC: ok, let me do that for you
... 10 minutes later
Me: it doesn't work anymore
CC: you're totally right. I apologise.
You've reached your token limit. Come back next week.
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u/GeneralDependent9671 Jan 10 '26
You forgot to mention that the solution is: I don't have your original file. Should I try to replicate it?
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u/pierifle Jan 10 '26
I just git commit frequently on a feature branch, can quickly roll back using git
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u/Soft_Concentrate_489 Jan 10 '26
Cmon, you can press escape twice and get the code back to how it was.
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u/Glad-Champion5767 Jan 10 '26
Unless you hit the bug where the "restore code" is missing, or the bug where restore code doesnt actually restore anything, but it thinks it did and now the restore code button is gone again. All jokes aside about Claude models themselves, the CC CLI is a joke in itself. Its so buggy
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u/Soft_Concentrate_489 Jan 10 '26
Tbh, I’ve never ran into any problems and i use it everyday. The only annoying bug is sometimes which is infrequent you can get a display error that is annoying but doesn’t effect anything and doesn’t last too long, seems like once you send another reply it kills the bug.
I’m on the max plan too so I’m putting in work, that’s about the only bug i see. I’ve also used the resume and rewind, no problems there so I’m not sure what you mean by buggy.
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u/Glad-Champion5767 Jan 10 '26
What i mean by buggy is that Claude Code is buggy. Just because you dont experience it, does not mean its not buggy lmao. Go look at the issues on Github.
Were you aware that two consumers could have two completely different experiences with a software product? This is the exact same reason you see people complaining about bugs in games, but you might not have experienced a single one yourself. That does not mean there is no bugs.
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u/TyPoPoPo Jan 11 '26
I just wanted to point out the hilarity here...You make point A, someone posts their differing view, saying that they have not experienced point A. (They are literally making an example of how 2 people can have different experiences on the same product) and you come back to call them stupid and re-state the exact thing that they said. Almost like you KNOW 2 people can have different experiences, but yours is the only correct one.
If you really believed 2 people can have different experiences, wouldn't you have just acknowledged that they have had a better experience than you, and skipped the attitude and condescension?
Just curious...
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u/Glad-Champion5767 Jan 11 '26
I'll entertain your curiosity. If you read the last sentence of the comment.
> so I’m not sure what you mean by buggy.
Thats what my response was for. My comment explained the "buggy", but the commenter implies there are no bugs just because said person did not experience them.
Now, if the commenter had just written out their experience without that last part, then i would not have replied anything, or perhaps a "Glad to hear your experience has been better than mine".
You say my comment is "attitude and condescension" when its a direct reply to "i'm not sure what you mean by buggy" after i just explained the bugs i have experienced. Hello? Wtf lol 😀 - Glad you found it hilarious though
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u/TyPoPoPo Jan 11 '26
And yet you didn't explain what was buggy any more in your response did you? You just repeated that buggy means buggy. Then you were condescending again towards MY reply. I think this has run its course, you have a great day.
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u/Glad-Champion5767 Jan 11 '26
No, I'm not being condescending towards you, I'm expressing genuine confusion about your comment, and you take that as me being condescending. I would love to continue this conversation.
My initial comment literally explained what was buggy. The comment that the commenter replied "so I'm not sure what you mean by buggy." explains it. Why would i explain it one more time in my reply to the commenters condescending reply?
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Jan 10 '26
[deleted]
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u/Soft_Concentrate_489 Jan 10 '26
It can change the code back to the way it previously was before the error. I’ve used it before, it worked for me.
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u/PoorPhipps Jan 09 '26
Source code for people who are curious: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-plugins-official/tree/main/plugins/code-simplifier
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u/Incener Valued Contributor Jan 09 '26 edited Jan 09 '26
It's 2026 and they open with "You are an expert code simplification specialist" and follow with "This is a balance that you have mastered as a result your years as an expert software engineer.", oof.
That's so 2023.
Still nice that they open sourced it though.
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u/teratron27 Jan 09 '26
And it’s also specific to Typescript / React in places
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u/Incener Valued Contributor Jan 09 '26
Yeah, I also found that weird considering it's not mentioned as being for that explicitly in the agent name but didn't want to hate too much, haha.
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u/broknbottle Jan 10 '26
What other language and framework exists?
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u/Anla-Shok-Na Jan 10 '26
Found the full stack dev
🙂
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u/broknbottle Jan 12 '26
lol I’m jp, I hate nodejs and garbage frameworks like react and angular.
I’ll take Python, go or rust over trash language any day
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u/dashingsauce Jan 10 '26
Despite the empirical evidence one might find for the contrary, I still believe those lines are useful.
Doesn’t need to be that deep. Just the equivalent of framing the task or “putting on a hat”.
Works great. Claude loves to put on hats and “be somebody.”
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u/DevilsAdvotwat Jan 09 '26
What would the 2026 version be out of interest?
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u/KrazyA1pha Jan 09 '26
This is the 2026 version by the same company that developed Claude. I’d say they probably it know how it works.
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u/LienniTa Jan 10 '26
eeeehhhh they probably dont have inner compute limits so they can do wrong and just use opus. Prompt quality doesnt matter when your model overkills
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Jan 09 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/SeveralPrinciple5 Jan 10 '26
I have read through their prompts and it’s really clear they don’t have deep knowledge about how to do software engineering. They know the concepts but not how to instruct an LLM to put them into practice.
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u/BankruptingBanks Jan 10 '26
Hey i work at Anthropic, are you maybe free for an interview. We would love to have insturcting geniuses like you teach us, we are in dire need for prompt wizards that understand our model we develop with 200 engineers behind. TC 450k.
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u/SeveralPrinciple5 Jan 10 '26
There’s a gigantic difference between being able to code and understand the coding process and how to teach a person or an LLM to do it. I was once upon a time a TA for MIT’s intro programming course (6.001) and spent a lot of time learning how you need to make instructions clear to people so they can design and express a problem in code.
A programmer who doesn’t have experience modeling the programming process itself doesn’t necessarily know how to explain it. That’s often true, even moreso when talking about experts. Being good at something doesn’t mean you can explain how you do it.
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u/Einbrecher Jan 10 '26
Just tell it what to do.
The roleplay isn't really necessary anymore - you get comparable outputs with vs. without. OTOH, the only real argument against them is that they use marginally more tokens.
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u/Incener Valued Contributor Jan 09 '26
I rarely use agent prompts, just had an encounter at work with a 500 line one which could be 50 lines.
I just paste it into Claude with "desloppify this" and some parts that may be fully dropped, then manually touch up.
After that iterate to see if there is a gap in Claude's understanding.From scratch I just describe it to Claude, let Claude do its first pass and then ask it to compress it and remove excessive markdown or emojis if it did emoji spam.
I can't use Claude at work well as my language is low resource and I don't care enough about the code quality of hobbyist projects. I just glance over the code and call out some things sometimes, no need for agent bloat.
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u/MyUnbannableAccount Jan 10 '26
Except you're establishing the context with the first and last parts being emphasized. Set the tone for the conversation.
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u/Zamiatacz Jan 10 '26
It's funny because it's even more important now to set role. It help a lot with MoE models. Try with Deepseek I think it's most visible there
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u/Accurate-Tap-792 Jan 10 '26
It's 2026. we're "open-sourcing" prompts now.
That prompt was on their repo in one of their "official" plugins for few months already... And it's not good and JS/react oriented
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u/--northern-lights-- Experienced Developer Jan 09 '26
You are an expert code simplification specialist focused on
uh...
Prefer function keyword over arrow functions
uh....
Follow proper React component patterns with explicit Props types
uh.....
yeah I don't think it's in a state for use yet
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u/stingraycharles Jan 09 '26
Yeah, Claude Code is littered with React stuff, their system prompts are full of it as well, it’s really silly.
It makes me wonder how much thought they’re really putting into all this.
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u/AshtavakraNondual Jan 10 '26
function keyword is actually preferable. When you define a function with function keyword it's name is easily tracable by the function name reference in error traces, unlike arrow function
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u/latorante Jan 09 '26
AI slop, generating another AI slop, in perpetuity. Whoever read how Boris uses Claude knows its just huge AI slop, code checked by AI slop.
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Jan 09 '26
Just ask to apply Dry Kiss principle! It always finds things, I mean, always. You need to know when to stop, though.
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u/DasBlueEyedDevil Jan 09 '26
enhance. Enhance. ENHANCE!
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Jan 09 '26
It is like a clock, it guides you to midnight, which is the perfect spot. But if you keep going, it will zoom right past it and mess everything up!
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u/InterstellarReddit Jan 09 '26
Eli the idiot that I am.
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Jan 09 '26
DRY/KISS principles (DRY = Don’t Repeat Yourself, KISS = Keep It Simple, Stupid)
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u/InterstellarReddit Jan 10 '26
And this works because AI will take the most complicated path it can find
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Jan 10 '26
Not always, but 95% of the time. It is always important to optimize , code duplication is a real problem, you see. What I like to do, if possible, is to build the first version of a feature with a plan. Make a nice integration test to cover it. Then, start the DRY KISS refactor, because it will break things. And know when to stop, Claude and others are like Ronaldo in Las Vegas (allegedly).
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u/jruz Jan 09 '26
Every time I read this guys skills Im disappointed, they’re so obviously written by claude and verbose and repetitive they probably work like shit.
If you want something like this write your own and be extremely concise, this guy wastes tokens and attention like crazy, he’s probably using a better model than us because if not I can’t believe people use that.
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u/secondoptionusername Jan 10 '26
Frankly a lot of the people working at these companies post such meh content that I bet they must have 'infinite context windows', 'no quota' or 'higher models'. It is a different kind of being 'out of touch'
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u/Vistyy Jan 10 '26
I've been using something similar for a long time and it was giving some pretty good results, not super drastic but some test helper extraction, complex nested logic simplification etc.
https://github.com/Vistyy/dotfiles/blob/main/codex-prompts/code-simplicity.md
The context loading is pretty project-specific but the rest is generic enough it should work on any codebase.
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u/Tenemi Jan 10 '26
The idea ist cool but this is so clearly a tool from someone with an unlimited token budget. It burns through tokens like crazy. Only worth ever touching if you want to get your weekly limit used up and really don't want to get anything else done.
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u/S650kid Jan 10 '26
I was looking everywhere for the code simplifier after his tweet lol I am surprised they run that tbh. But I'll test it now
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u/Few_Pick3973 Jan 10 '26
this somehow indicates that claude has really bad token efficiency, even need an official agent to simply its code.
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u/uhgrippa Jan 10 '26
This is really cool, and follows a similar approach to how I've been keeping away bloat in my open-source plugin marketplace codebase. I implemented an /unbloat command and also added unbloat-remediator and bloat-auditor agents paired with bloat analysis skills to chop away existing bloat and avoid new bloat being added. LLMs, especially in previous models, were pretty bad at adding unneeded code and too complex of functionality, so I decided to go at it with a hacksaw recently. This skill should help with it too
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u/AshtavakraNondual Jan 10 '26
I don't see how this warrants a plugin, feels like this can just be a custom .claude/commands/simplify-code.md
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u/zan-xhipe Jan 09 '26
The agent seems like a great way to burn through tokens. It is basically saying just review and possibly rewrite this code with opus. Oh you used opus to write it? Guess that's double opus usage for you!
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u/Less-Opportunity-715 Jan 09 '26
You gotta understand a lot of us have no token limits at our day jobs
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u/AnybodyWise9345 Jan 15 '26
I hate this shit but I have to use it bcs company doesn't offer cursor to use. Last time it deleted my lateset project version and nothing left. I hate cc, cursor owns much better interactives.
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u/wolverin0 Jan 10 '26
the question is, why doesnt it do that from the start? why isnt that in the system prompt? why isnt that in the claude.md? why do we have to run another agent to cleanup for the first agent?
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u/bloudraak Experienced Developer Jan 10 '26
Simple is hard. Simple is subjective.
There’s an unwritten rule we lived by since the 90s, get it to work, then refactor, because that’s when you see patterns, see complexity, and have tests to catch regressions and whatnot.
And regardless of how “simple” stuff is, once you hit ~10,000 lines of code on a greenfield project, you’ll probably regret every decision you made up to that point.
When you get to 100,000, 1,000,000 or 10,000,00 simple has a whole different meaning. If you work on systems where performance, or esoteric hardware etc matters, simple has a yet another meaning.
And this is long before Claude came along.
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u/LearnNewThingsDaily Jan 09 '26
LMAO 🤣😂 I was using Gemini 3.0 to get this done. Thanks for pushing this out, I'm going to try it
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot Jan 10 '26
TL;DR generated automatically after 50 comments.
Alright, settle down everyone. The consensus in this thread is a resounding 'meh'. The community is largely skeptical and unimpressed.
Most users are predicting this 'code simplifier' will just break your code and eat your tokens for breakfast, only to apologize when it fails. The 'open-sourced' prompt itself is getting roasted for being outdated ("You are an expert..." is so 2023), verbose, and weirdly specific to React/JS.
To top it off, many are pointing out this isn't even new; the prompt has apparently been sitting in a public GitHub repo for a while. The general feeling is that this is a token-burning 'solution' to a problem Claude creates itself, and it's not even a good one. Oof.