Complexity concentration as a god-class and god-method detector: a pre-registered test of a scale-free outlier rule against tool definitions and human labels

Daniel Sagenschneider

God-class and god-method detectors mark concentrated complexity with a raw-scale threshold, a constant fitted on a corpus and re-fitted when the population moves. This paper pre-registers a test of a rule with no raw-scale constant: a unit is a god unit when its complexity is a robust outlier for its own codebase, a modified z-score of 3.5 or more. On 445 repositories in ten languages, 171 of them Java, and the 492 Java repositories of MLCQ, the rule is scored against PMD's GodClass, MLCQ's reviewers and two further definitions, with signal and cutoff chosen on half the repositories and read on the rest. LLM-written code may gather its complexity differently, the case for a detector that needs no re-fitting; the first question is whether one can match the scale of existing human-written code. The verdict is inconclusive on both populations, by different arms. The rule ranks PMD's god classes from the per-file maximum of cognitive complexity at per-repository AUCs of 0.916 and 0.908. On the main run it is, at its default, non-inferior within the margin to a cutoff tuned on the same population on recovery, and flags about twice as many non-god classes; on MLCQ it flags about as…