refactoring skill

Overview

This skill helps safely refactor the WeChat chat auto-reply assistant codebase to improve clarity, reduce duplication, and lower complexity without changing behavior. It guides small, verifiable changes and enforces naming, boundary handling, and compact table UI conventions. Use it to make the project more maintainable while preserving existing functionality.

How this skill works

The skill inspects functions, modules, and UI components in the Python assistant to locate long functions, duplicated logic, magic values, and complex conditionals. It proposes minimal-change refactor plans, performs small-step edits, and includes verification steps (unit tests or reproducible manual checks). It also enforces compact table styling when refactoring code that renders table-like UI.

When to use it

• When a function exceeds a reasonable length or has multiple responsibilities
• When the codebase contains duplicated logic across modules
• When conditional logic is nested or hard to follow
• When magic values are sprinkled through the code instead of named constants
• When UI table rendering needs consistent compact styling

Best practices

• Preserve behavior first: write or run tests before refactoring
• Make minimal, incremental commits so changes are easy to review and revert
• Verify each change with tests or a reproducible manual path
• Extract repeated logic to a single function or helper module
• Replace magic values with well-named constants and clarify intent
• When touching table UI, keep th/td padding to 6px 10px and line-height to 1.2; compact tags inside cells

Example use cases

• Split a long message-processing function into parse_input, route_message, and format_reply helpers
• Extract duplicate API call logic into a shared client wrapper with retries and error handling
• Replace nested if/else chains with early returns and a small dispatcher
• Introduce constants for timeout, retry count, and default reply to avoid scattered literals
• Refactor the admin dashboard table renderer to use compact cell padding and consistent tag styles

FAQ