Slop audit

Use the native implement lifecycle for accepted changes, including its ready PR requirement. Finish with review, ship when authorized, and sweep. Read docs/development/repo-map.md to choose concrete ownership boundaries.

Evidence before cleanup

Maintain a temporary ledger outside tracked files. For a repository-wide pass, cover the analyzer pipeline, engine/API/output/CLI, protocol hosts, editor and web consumers, packaging/sidecars, and maintenance tooling. Inspect these axes within each relevant domain:

• tests: tautologies, shadow implementations, unreachable assertions, weak failure injection, and duplicate behavior coverage;
• abstractions: forwarding wrappers, test-only seams, speculative options, duplicated normalization or derived state;
• runtime cost: avoidable owned copies, intermediate collections, repeated work;
• failure behavior: swallowed errors, stale fallbacks, lifecycle and cleanup;
• ownership: public contracts, dynamic entrypoints, security/release boundaries;
• maintenance: obsolete comments, copied catalogues, dead routes and dependencies.

Record exact paths, real callers, the proposed simplification, retained behavioral coverage, and validation evidence. Distinguish inspected/no-change from unexamined or blocked areas. A search hit is a hypothesis, not a finding. Use disjoint subagents for independent domains when available, then have a reviewer challenge both accepted changes and plausible no-change decisions.

Before removing a test, establish which executed assertion implies its useful contract. For misleading tests, inject a realistic production fault and show that the old test accepts it while the replacement rejects it. Keep the replacement on the runtime path, not a second implementation in test code. Similar bodies, assertion counts, or deletion targets do not prove redundancy. Apply the test evidence rules in docs/development/quality-gates.md to each kept or replacement test.

A comment that explains a surprise in the code flags that symbol for a refactor: make the code clear, then remove the comment. When you are not sure about a comment, flag it in the ledger. Do not delete it.

Trace private helpers through all callers before inlining. Preserve public facades, dynamic consumers, compatibility fallbacks, distinct regressions, and integrity guards. An always-true private option may be removed only after all callers are verified; retain its required behavior unconditionally.

For ownership changes, prove lifetimes and error/ordering parity. Measure allocations or runtime before claiming a performance gain. Avoid generalizing an abstraction merely to merge two similar implementations.

Completion

Run focused checks, realistic public-project validation, and the relevant full suites from docs/development/quality-gates.md. Compare nonempty outputs and negative controls; include cold/warm/no-cache modes when analysis changes. Bug fixes require the normal failing reproduction and real-world validation.

In a second pass, revisit previous assumptions with new callers, counterexamples, or runtime probes. Repeating searches or passing the same suite is not deeper coverage. Stop when accepted findings are resolved, independent review has no blockers, and remaining hypotheses have explicit evidence or stated limits. Report concrete changes and verification, without claiming the repository is free of defects. An authorized merge is complete only after merged-commit CI.