Ln 54 Codebase Auditor

Codebase Auditor

Goal: Perform a broad, read-only production-code health audit. Find concrete cross-cutting failure, security, delivery, and maintenance risks without turning detector matches or personal style preferences into findings. Do not substitute for documentation trust, test-portfolio, whole-architecture, or persistence-specific review.

Execution contract: The checklist defines completion. Track each item internally as PENDING, PROVEN with evidence, CLEARED with evidence its condition is absent, or UNPROVEN with a gap; reading, delegation, tool failure, a zero exit status, or a self-reported success is not proof; only the observed outcome is. Reconcile after each section. Before returning, resolve all PENDING, count only PROVEN and CLEARED, and apply verdict and approval rules to every gap. Preserve intent, scope, and existing authorization. Continue authorized work; ask only for consequential unresolved choices or required external approval. When no one can answer during the run, state the exact question and apply the skill's verdict for the remaining gap instead of waiting or guessing. Scale depth to material risk without skipping checks. Preserve dependency and safety order; otherwise choose an appropriate verification method. Accept equivalent user or repository evidence; no other skill, named artifact, or complete lifecycle is required. Preserve source requirement and decision IDs. Bind reused evidence to relevant source versions, dirty changes, configuration, and environment; invalidate only affected claims. On continuation, reconcile task, authorization, current state, and unresolved evidence. For long work, return a compact continuation record or update an already authorized artifact; read-only skills do not persist it. Distinguish artifact readiness, verified behavior, and external-action authority. Prepare authorized work before required approval. If blocked by an instruction, cite its exact source and unresolved boundary; do not invent approval gates from caution.

Tool Routing

Start with summary-level discovery and narrow before reading deeply. Run only repository-defined or clearly safe diagnostic commands; never publish, deploy, migrate production data, rotate secrets, or rewrite files during the audit.

Evidence Rules

• A pattern match is a candidate, not a finding. Confirm reachability, context, and consequence.
• Runtime failure or deterministic command output outweighs static suspicion; static evidence remains valid when execution is unavailable and the limitation is explicit.
• Generated, vendored, fixture, migration-history, and intentionally compatible code require context-specific treatment.
• External best practice is actionable only when it addresses a concrete repository defect or risk.
• Score or count only findings with distinct root causes; deduplicate symptoms that share one correction.

Checklist

1. Establish Scope and Baseline

• Detect languages, frameworks, package managers, entrypoints, deployment model, generated areas, and the repository's supported verification commands.
• Classify each runtime surface as long-running service, CLI, library, job, serverless function, or platform-managed component before requiring probes, telemetry, signal handling, or shutdown behavior.
• Read applicable instructions and identify security boundaries, critical business paths, public interfaces, and irreversible operations.
• Inspect Git state so the audit does not overwrite, misattribute, or ignore unrelated user changes.
• Establish feasible build, lint, type, test, and smoke baselines; record executed scope, environment, exit status, and evidence. Verify required work ran rather than succeeding with no selected tests or skipped gates.
• Define exclusions and depth based on risk rather than scanning every file with equal effort.
• Keep the audit read-only. Allow only permitted caches and build artifacts and disclose them when created.

2. Audit Security and Delivery Boundaries

• Search for committed secrets, unsafe credential patterns, sensitive defaults, debug bypasses, and accidental exposure through logs or errors.
• For credential findings, never expose the raw value: distinguish live material from placeholders, fixtures, examples, and allowlisted fingerprints; report only the type, location, and redacted evidence, and recommend revocation, rotation, or history remediation only for confirmed exposure without performing it during the audit.
• Trace untrusted input into SQL, shell, templates, HTML, file paths, URLs, deserialization, redirects, and other injection-sensitive sinks.
• Check authentication, authorization, tenant or ownership isolation, privilege transitions, insecure direct object access, and default-deny behavior.
• Check validation at trust boundaries, canonicalization, size and rate limits, unsafe file operations, and destructive-action confirmation or guards.
• Verify security findings against actual call paths, framework behavior, configuration, and current official guidance before assigning severity.
• Inspect compiler, linter, type checker, tests, packaging, and CI configuration for skipped gates, ignored failures, environment drift, and non-reproducible delivery.
• Verify that successful packaging produces the intended entrypoints, assets, metadata, target platform, and deployable artifact; exit code zero alone does not prove a shippable build.
• Find stale skip, quarantine, allow-failure, continue-on-error, and warning-suppression paths that make required signals appear green.
• Check configuration completeness, required environment validation, unsafe fallbacks, missing examples, and differences between local, CI, and deployment settings.

3. Audit Maintainability and Dependencies

• Find evidence-backed duplication across functions, handlers, modules, configuration, and integration code; distinguish shared domain concepts from coincidental similarity.
• Identify over-abstraction, unused extension points, excessive factories or wrappers, parallel mechanisms, and custom utilities that duplicate declared platform capabilities.
• Before merging duplication or removing an abstraction, check lifecycle and ownership boundaries, intentional decoupling, dependency injection or test seams, framework requirements, public extension contracts, and expected independent evolution.
• Inspect complexity hotspots, long methods, god modules, deep nesting, excessive parameters, boolean-mode APIs, misleading names, and mixed responsibilities.
• Check algorithms for early-exit mistakes, duplicate-key loss, boundary errors, unbounded work, repeated scans, mutation during iteration, and hidden shared state.
• Check hardcoded operational values, URLs, timeouts, limits, identifiers, and environment-specific behavior that should be explicit configuration or named policy.
• Trace one concept across external contracts, DTOs, services, persistence, and storage; flag synonym or casing drift only when no explicit serializer, code-generation, or ORM boundary mapping explains it.
• Audit dependency vulnerabilities, support status, license or runtime constraints, duplicate packages, unused packages, and credible replacement or removal opportunities.
• Match advisories to the resolved version and deployment, then classify exposure as confirmed, unknown, or not applicable using reachability and exploit conditions; an unavailable call path cannot clear an affected component.
• Recommend native, existing-dependency, or external replacements only after checking required feature parity, migration surface, maintenance, license, security history, and domain-specific behavior.
• Find unreachable code, unused imports and exports, commented-out implementations, obsolete flags, dead compatibility shims, and replacement code left beside its successor.
• Confirm dead-code findings against reflection, registration, framework discovery, configuration, serialization, templates, and external entrypoints before reporting deletion as safe.