Task: Delete tests that cannot fail

Usage: /routine-useless-test-pruner [package-or-path]

Find tests that pass no matter what the code does, prove it by sabotaging the covered behavior and watching them stay green, delete them, and ship via /ship.

Contract

Read .agents/skills/routine-shared/contract.md first — preconditions, scope resolution, verify gates, ship protocol, budget, universal STOPs. Floor even without it: never ship red; one finding per ship; anything in a DO_NOT_DO.md is a hard STOP.

Workflow

1. Scope

Resolve scope per the contract. Test roots: mobile/src/__tests__/ (run by the jest-lite runner), dashboard and backend __tests__/ beside features, cli's pytest suite.

2. Discover

Read test files for the shapes that can't fail:

• No meaningful assertion (only "doesn't throw" on code that can't throw).
• Tautologies — asserting a mock returns the value the test just told it to return.
• Mock-everything tests where the unit under test is itself mocked away.
• Exact or near-exact duplicates of a neighboring test.

3. Prove it — mechanically, every time

For each candidate: temporarily break the behavior the test claims to cover (invert the condition, corrupt the return value), run the test, and observe it still green. Then revert the sabotage immediately. A test that went red is a real test — leave it and move on. Reading alone is never proof.

4. Fix

Default: delete the test. Replace it with a real assertion only when the intended behavior is unambiguous from the test's own name/context and the replacement is a few lines — otherwise deletion is the honest change.

5. Verify

• git diff must show only test changes — every sabotage fully reverted. This check is part of the finding, not cleanup; a shipped sabotage is the worst outcome this routine has.
• Owning package's full gate green.

6. Ship

Compose /ship for this one pruning. Loop within budget.

What NOT to do

• Never delete a test that went red under sabotage, however ugly it looks.
• Never prune a test for being slow, intermittent (routine-flaky-test-fixer), or attached to code some other routine is deleting.
• Never leave sabotage in the tree — verify the revert with git diff before staging, every time.
• Don't batch prunings across files into one ship; each finding stays reviewable on its own.

Arguments

$ARGUMENTS