Finding CC Safety Net Simplifications

This skill turns a broad "find things to simplify" request into evidence-backed candidates that remove or collapse existing surface area. It is guidance, not a checklist: follow the code, keep judgment active, and prefer a few well-proven candidates over many thin ones.

Over-engineering is this repo's documented dominant failure mode (see Scope Discipline in AGENTS.md), so simplification proposals have a tailwind, but the same discipline applies to the proposals themselves: each one must name the concrete cost the current code carries, not just "this looks complex."

Start With Repo Context

• Read AGENTS.md (Scope Discipline, Testing, Style Guide, Knip rules), REVIEW.md (threat model and review boundary), and SECURITY.md (the standard/strict/paranoid mode contract).
• Read docs/residual-risk.md before judging anything in src/core/shell, src/gate/analyzer, src/gate/guards, or src/core/rules. Adjudicated bypass families are settled decisions; fixtures pinning them are load-bearing even when nothing else references them. Read docs/secret-protection-known-limitations.md before judging src/gate/secret.
• The mode contract is the repo's central seam: standard mode blocks recognizable accidental destruction and is explicitly not bypass-proof; strict/paranoid fail closed. Emulation that exists only to read crafted adversarial shapes more faithfully in standard mode exceeds the documented contract, REVIEW.md forbids adding it, which makes any existing instance a prime simplification candidate. Conversely, fail-closed machinery in strict/paranoid is contract, not bloat, and so is a positionless refusal that makes the parser report a constructed shape invalid at every level, standard included: "What Is Never Residual Risk" in docs/residual-risk.md prescribes exactly that remedy when a constructed input defeats a catastrophic protection.

Treat As Intentional By Default