Agent skill
tech-debt
Identify, categorize, and prioritize technical debt. Trigger with "tech debt", "technical debt audit", "what should we refactor", "code health", or when the user asks about code quality, refactoring priorities, or maintenance backlog.
Install this agent skill to your Project
npx add-skill https://github.com/anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins/tree/main/engineering/skills/tech-debt
SKILL.md
Tech Debt Management
Systematically identify, categorize, and prioritize technical debt.
Categories
| Type | Examples | Risk |
|---|---|---|
| Code debt | Duplicated logic, poor abstractions, magic numbers | Bugs, slow development |
| Architecture debt | Monolith that should be split, wrong data store | Scaling limits |
| Test debt | Low coverage, flaky tests, missing integration tests | Regressions ship |
| Dependency debt | Outdated libraries, unmaintained dependencies | Security vulns |
| Documentation debt | Missing runbooks, outdated READMEs, tribal knowledge | Onboarding pain |
| Infrastructure debt | Manual deploys, no monitoring, no IaC | Incidents, slow recovery |
Prioritization Framework
Score each item on:
- Impact: How much does it slow the team down? (1-5)
- Risk: What happens if we don't fix it? (1-5)
- Effort: How hard is the fix? (1-5, inverted — lower effort = higher priority)
Priority = (Impact + Risk) x (6 - Effort)
Output
Produce a prioritized list with estimated effort, business justification for each item, and a phased remediation plan that can be done alongside feature work.
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