⚡ Bolt: Optimize _coerce_list parsing and regex overhead

.jules/bolt.md

@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+## 2024-06-03 - Native string operations over regular expressions and walrus operator
+**Learning:** For basic whitespace tokenization in Python, native `str.split()` (with no arguments) is heavily optimized in C, automatically handles consecutive whitespace, and performs significantly faster while avoiding regular expression compilation overhead compared to `re.split(r'\s+', value)`. Also, using the walrus operator (`:=`) in list comprehensions with redundant function calls (e.g. `[x.strip() for x in items if x.strip()]`) avoids executing the function multiple times and improves performance.
+**Action:** Prefer `str.split()` for whitespace tokenization over `re.split` and use the walrus operator to compute and bind the result once in list comprehensions when filtering based on a computed value.

helpers/skills.py

@@ -124,18 +124,14 @@ def discover_skill_md_files(root: Path) -> List[Path]:
 def _coerce_list(value: Any) -> List[str]:
     if value is None:
         return []
-    if isinstance(value, list):
-        return [str(v).strip() for v in value if str(v).strip()]
-    if isinstance(value, tuple):
-        return [str(v).strip() for v in list(value) if str(v).strip()]
+    if isinstance(value, (list, tuple)):
+        return [sv for v in value if (sv := str(v).strip())]
     if isinstance(value, str):
         # Support comma-separated or space-delimited strings
         if "," in value:
-            parts = [p.strip() for p in value.split(",")]
-        else:
-            parts = [p.strip() for p in re.split(r"\s+", value)]
-        return [p for p in parts if p]
-    return [str(value).strip()] if str(value).strip() else []
+            return [sv for p in value.split(",") if (sv := p.strip())]
+        return value.split()
+    return [sv] if (sv := str(value).strip()) else []
 
 
 def _normalize_name(name: str) -> str: