wtf is charon?

Charon is a single prompt file for Claude Code that audits a codebase for dead code, unused files, unused dependencies, and duplicated logic, then optionally removes what it confirms is truly dead. It is named after the mythological ferryman who only carries the already dead, and the tool takes that idea seriously: it only acts on findings it can prove, only after an independent review step, and only on a separate branch that you choose to merge yourself. Running the command asks you to pick one of two modes: one where confirmed clean removals are executed automatically after the audit, and one where the process stops at a written report and only acts on the specific findings you approve. Before removing anything, Charon studies the project to understand its languages, build system, and public interfaces, since a library's exported functions count as alive even if nothing inside the project calls them directly. It then runs established, language-specific dead-code and duplicate-code detection tools appropriate to the codebase, and organizes what they find into removal candidates, findings needing human judgment such as code reached through reflection or plugin systems, and clusters of duplicated code. Every accepted removal happens as its own change on a dedicated cleanup branch, checked over by a separate reviewer step whose only job is to argue the code might still be alive, and verified against your build and tests before being kept, anything that fails this gets reverted automatically. The tool never merges its own branch, never resolves judgment-required findings without you, and leaves your repository completely untouched if you decide not to act on the report at all. It works standalone in any repository, but was designed to pair with a companion project called Phanes, feeding its findings and cleanup work into that project's existing review and documentation systems when both are present. The project is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license, so noncommercial use, sharing, and adaptation with credit is permitted, but commercial use requires contacting the author separately.