phantom-limb

What This Skill Does

Phantom Limb is a diagnostic agent skill for OpenClaw that detects 'ghost dependencies'—references to concepts, configurations, or environmental states that no longer exist in your production environment but persist within your codebase. Unlike traditional linters that look for syntax errors or broken imports, Phantom Limb analyzes the semantic gaps between your code and its actual deployment context. It identifies the 'negative space' where deprecated logic, stale environmental variables, and architectural artifacts continue to influence the runtime environment without throwing explicit errors. By flagging these dormant connections, the tool reduces cognitive load, speeds up onboarding, and eliminates the 'it works on my machine' class of bugs.

Installation

To integrate this skill into your environment, use the OpenClaw command-line interface. Ensure you have the necessary read permissions for your source directory.

Command: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/jcools1977/phantom-limb

After installation, initialize the tool by pointing it to your root directory: openclaw phantom-limb scan --path ./src

Use Cases

• Refactoring Cleanup: Identify legacy wrappers that were intended to be temporary but are still being imported by newer modules.
• Production Debugging: Detect why certain features behave inconsistently by uncovering hidden fallbacks to environment variables that are no longer populated in the cluster.
• Onboarding Optimization: Clean up stale, confusing 'deprecated' paths that slow down new developers trying to understand the current architecture.
• Dependency Auditing: Locate code blocks that rely on internal service endpoints or hardware assumptions that have been decommissioned.

Example Prompts

1. 'Run a full audit on the repository to identify any environment variables referenced in the code that aren't defined in our current CI/CD environment files.'
2. 'Check for referential phantoms in the legacy folder; flag any imports that resolve through more than two shims or re-export layers.'
3. 'Identify any code paths that reference the old v1 API architecture that are still active despite the total migration to v2.'

Tips & Limitations

Phantom Limb is a static analysis tool; it cannot detect runtime-only phantoms that are only created through dynamic evaluation or complex runtime reflection. It works best when combined with live deployment manifests. Always review the output before applying automated code deletions, as some 'phantoms' may serve as safety buffers for edge-case hardware or legacy clients that you are still actively supporting.