$npx -y skills add anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins --skill tech-debtIdentify, 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.
| 1 | # Tech Debt Management |
| 2 | |
| 3 | Systematically identify, categorize, and prioritize technical debt. |
| 4 | |
| 5 | ## Categories |
| 6 | |
| 7 | | Type | Examples | Risk | |
| 8 | |------|----------|------| |
| 9 | | **Code debt** | Duplicated logic, poor abstractions, magic numbers | Bugs, slow development | |
| 10 | | **Architecture debt** | Monolith that should be split, wrong data store | Scaling limits | |
| 11 | | **Test debt** | Low coverage, flaky tests, missing integration tests | Regressions ship | |
| 12 | | **Dependency debt** | Outdated libraries, unmaintained dependencies | Security vulns | |
| 13 | | **Documentation debt** | Missing runbooks, outdated READMEs, tribal knowledge | Onboarding pain | |
| 14 | | **Infrastructure debt** | Manual deploys, no monitoring, no IaC | Incidents, slow recovery | |
| 15 | |
| 16 | ## Prioritization Framework |
| 17 | |
| 18 | Score each item on: |
| 19 | - **Impact**: How much does it slow the team down? (1-5) |
| 20 | - **Risk**: What happens if we don't fix it? (1-5) |
| 21 | - **Effort**: How hard is the fix? (1-5, inverted — lower effort = higher priority) |
| 22 | |
| 23 | Priority = (Impact + Risk) x (6 - Effort) |
| 24 | |
| 25 | ## Output |
| 26 | |
| 27 | Produce a prioritized list with estimated effort, business justification for each item, and a phased remediation plan that can be done alongside feature work. |