Software Development
Technical Debt Tracker
Maintains a running register of technical debt introduced during development sessions, including shortcuts taken, skipped tests, and complexity increases. Useful for visible debt accounting and prioritized paydown planning. Tech leads maintaining long-lived codebases, engineering managers reporting on code health to leadership, platform teams driving paydown sprints, individual engineers who want their own "I owe myself this" list. The difference between a healthy and unhealthy codebase after a year of AI-assisted work is whether the team tracked what they were trading off. Most teams do not — debt lives scattered in TODO comments, half-remembered conversations, and Jira tickets no one looks at. A structured register gives the team a single source of truth, a prioritization model, and a weekly delta so paydown becomes a planned activity instead of a crisis.
One-Time Purchase
$19.99
TECH_DEBT.md
Provenance key: chosen = deliberate shortcut with sign-off · discovered = surfaced in review, audit, or incident
Status key: open · in-progress · closed
Register Summary
5 open · 1 in-progress · 1 closed last week. Two open items (TD-001, TD-004) carry scores ≥ 8 with no owner. One item (TD-002) has a hard deadline inside the next sprint window. Net debt held flat this week — added one (Mongoose EOL), closed one (React class components).
Total open debt items, up 1 from last cycle. Recommended paydown budget this sprint: 6 engineer-days.
Debt by area
Register
| ID | Title | Status | Provenance | Score | Effort | Deadline | Risk |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TD-001 | Sync file I/O in export pipeline | open | chosen | 8 | M | — | High |
| TD-002 | JWT secret has no rotation path | open | discovered | 9 | S | next sprint | Critical |
| TD-003 | Hardcoded invite email template | open | chosen | 3 | S | — | Low |
| TD-004 | UserService.findAll() no pagination | in-progress | discovered | 8 | M | — | High |
| TD-005 | Mongoose 6.x — upstream EOL | open | discovered | 7 | L | 4 months | Medium |
| TD-006 | React class components (Settings) | closed | chosen | 2 | S | — | Closed |
Age vs Impact
Pay this down now
High impact, near deadline
Has external time pressure or active incident risk
Plan, do not start yet
High impact, no near deadline
Important but not urgent — let active work finish first
Pay These Down Now
TD-002 — JWT rotation
Score 9 / 10 · Effort S · Hard deadline next sprint. Discovered in security review last sprint. No path exists to rotate the signing secret without a full redeploy and forced logout of every active session. ADR-07 already approves the AWS Secrets Manager integration — implementation is straightforward, the gate is sequencing.
TD-001 — sync file I/O in export pipeline
Score 8 / 10 · Effort M · No deadline, but active risk. Surfaced in last load test at 40 req/s. Current workaround is a 3-concurrent-job semaphore which caps throughput visibly. Refactor to streaming async writes is bounded and well understood.
TD-004 — `UserService.findAll()` pagination
Score 8 / 10 · In progress. Caused one P2 incident recently (12 s query timeout at 48k user rows). PR #301 has cursor-based pagination in review. Do not start a parallel branch — support the existing PR instead.
Recommended Sprint Plan
6-day paydown budget
CI Integration — Flag Debt-Adding PRs
Add to .github/workflows/ci.yml:
- name: Scan for new technical debt markers
run: |
NEW_MARKERS=$(git diff origin/main...HEAD -- '*.ts' '*.tsx' '*.js' | \
grep -E '^\+.*\b(TODO|FIXME|HACK|XXX|DEBT)\b' | grep -v '^+++')
if [ -n "$NEW_MARKERS" ]; then
echo "New technical debt markers detected in this PR:"
echo "$NEW_MARKERS"
echo ""
echo "Please add a TECH_DEBT.md entry before merging, or annotate with:"
echo " # DEBT-ACCEPTED: <reason> — <owner> — <date>"
exit 1
fi
Policy. PRs that introduce TODO, FIXME, HACK, or DEBT markers must either (a) include a new TD-NNN entry in TECH_DEBT.md, or (b) annotate inline with DEBT-ACCEPTED: <reason> — <owner> — <date>. The check does not block on pre-existing markers — only net-new diff lines.
Illustrative register. Item IDs, scores, and deadlines are reset every cycle from the underlying source — PRs, incidents, audits, and TODO comments.
This sample illustrates the skill's output format. Names, metrics, and operational details are illustrative unless the artifact explicitly analyzes public information.
View full sample →
All sales final. No refunds on digital products.
Includes support for Claude Code, Codex, OpenClaw, and Google Antigravity in the same license.
Also in Specs & Governance
Bundle price: $55. Compare this skill with the full workflow bundle or Pro access.
Best for
Tech leads on long-lived codebases who want a visible register of shortcuts taken, skipped tests, and known-bad patterns so paydown becomes a planned sprint activity rather than an emergency response. Especially useful for teams running a high volume of AI-assisted work where debt accumulates faster than human review can flag it.
Not ideal for
Teams that already use Jira or Linear as their debt register and won’t maintain a second source of truth — the skill works only if the team commits to it. Also a poor fit for very small codebases where the entire debt landscape fits in a single TODO list and a tracker adds ceremony.
Included in this purchase
- Claude Code, Codex, OpenClaw, and Google Antigravity skill files.
- Setup guidance for the right adapter in your workspace.
- One-time license for the purchased skill version.
Setup
Plan for a short setup in the repository or workspace where the skill will run. Some coding familiarity helps for implementation-heavy outputs.
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Future Updates
This purchase includes the current version of the skill. If you want future adapter updates — meaning compatibility and packaging updates as supported platforms evolve — plus new catalog additions included automatically, upgrade to Pro.