Review a diff for what Honey would cut — over-engineering (speculative generality, hand-rolled stdlib, single-caller abstractions) and over-verbosity (dead code, narration, redundant comments). Outputs a terse delete-list, one line per finding, with the line count each cut saves. Use when asked to review, trim, or de-bloat a change, or before opening a PR. Quality lever only — it finds waste, not correctness bugs.
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---
name: honey-review
description: >-
Review a diff for what Honey would cut — over-engineering (speculative
generality, hand-rolled stdlib, single-caller abstractions) and over-verbosity
(dead code, narration, redundant comments). Outputs a terse delete-list, one
line per finding, with the line count each cut saves. Use when asked to review,
trim, or de-bloat a change, or before opening a PR. Quality lever only — it
finds waste, not correctness bugs.
license: MIT
---
# Honey Review
Read the diff (`git diff` or the named range). Report only what to **cut** and why — the reverse of Honey's two write-levers.
## Find
- **Over-engineering** (Lever 1) — code that needn't exist: speculative params, "might need it later" branches, single-caller abstractions, hand-rolled `itertools`/`pathlib`/`datetime`, a new dependency for four lines, a reimplemented existing util.
- **Over-verbosity** (Lever 2) — dead code, commented-out blocks, comments narrating what the code already says, redundant scaffolding.
## Never flag (the carve-out is load-bearing)
Input validation, error handling, auth, secrets handling, accessibility basics, and visual/UX polish on user-facing deliverables are **not** bloat. A test or assert proving non-trivial logic is **not** bloat. Don't suggest cutting them.
## Output — delete-list, one line per finding
```
path:line — cut <what>; <one-clause why> (−N lines)
```
- Ordered by lines saved, deepest first.
- End with one total line: `Total: −N lines across M findings.`
- Nothing to cut → say so in one line. Don't manufacture findings.
- Terse but human-readable (this is for a person, not an agent — that's `hive-reviewer`'s job).
Example:
```
src/util.py:12 — cut hand-rolled flatten; stdlib itertools.chain.from_iterable does it (−9 lines)
src/api.js:40 — cut unused `opts` param; no caller passes it (−3 lines)
Total: −12 lines across 2 findings.
```
