Anthropic Open-Sourced the Cleanup Crew

Boris Cherny from the Claude Code team just open-sourced the code-simplifier agent they use internally. claude plugin install code-simplifier and you're done.

The pitch is simple: at the end of a long coding session, or when you're staring at a complex PR that grew three abstractions past the point of dignity, you ask Claude to run the simplifier. It strips the cruft.

What's interesting isn't the agent itself — code simplification tools have existed forever — it's that Anthropic is dog-fooding this internally and then publishing the thing their own team actually uses. Not a demo. Not a research artifact. The actual tool, with the actual config, that the people who build Claude Code reach for when their own code gets messy.

There's a plugin marketplace now, which means the Claude Code ecosystem is developing the same way every developer tool ecosystem develops: someone builds the thing they need, and then other people turn out to need it too.

This is the kind of announcement that deserves four exclamation marks.