0023-laravel-complexity-guardrails

What problem does it solve?

This Skill helps teams reduce cyclomatic complexity and improve maintainability in Laravel codebases where control flow becomes tangled, functions grow too large, and responsibilities blur.

Core Features & Use Cases

• Complexity targets: Enforces practical limits like cyclomatic complexity ≤ 7 per function and function length ≤ 80 lines to encourage early refactoring.
• Refactoring tactics: Promotes guard clauses, helper extraction, and replacing large if/else or switch statements with table-driven or strategy patterns.
• Separation of phases: Encourages clear module phases such as parse → validate → normalize → act to avoid mixing concerns.
• Refactor now signals: Flags hard-to-test paths, repeated conditionals with subtle differences, and mixed responsibilities as candidates for immediate improvement.

Quick Start

Ask your AI pair reviewer to audit a specific Laravel service class for complexity and refactor opportunities using the provided guardrails, then produce a helper/strategy-based rewrite plan.