Quality work is treated as a cost with no visible return. But the structures that make code hard to maintain, like repeated queries, recomputed values and stale dependencies, are often the ones that make it expensive to run.
The fix you can use today
Fund quality work (duplication, complexity, missing tests) as part of normal maintenance.
Track energy alongside quality metrics so the saving is visible.
Do quality first, then energy-specific optimisation.
Studies of code clean-ups report energy savings of 10 to 30%, before any energy work. GreenCode's climate case is built on this range.
Tools that help
GreenCode Constitution skill (GreenCode researchers): open-source energy principles and a catalogue of 37 energy anti-patterns that an AI coding agent can follow to find and fix waste like this
SonarQube: static analysis for code smells, bugs and security issues, with quality gates in CI
Green Metrics Tool: measures the energy of whole software scenarios run in containers, so runs can be repeated and compared
How GreenCode helps
GreenCode helps tackle this by checking a codebase for quality, security and green software patterns in one pass. Wasteful code comes out as a ranked defect, alongside the bugs and security findings. More on this.
