Agent Skills: Technical Debt Assessment

Assess, quantify, and prioritize technical debt using code analysis, metrics, and impact analysis. Use when planning refactoring, evaluating codebases, or making architectural decisions.

UncategorizedID: aj-geddes/useful-ai-prompts/technical-debt-assessment

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pnpm dlx add-skill https://github.com/aj-geddes/useful-ai-prompts/tree/HEAD/skills/technical-debt-assessment

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skills/technical-debt-assessment/SKILL.md

Skill Metadata

Name
technical-debt-assessment
Description
>

Technical Debt Assessment

Table of Contents

Overview

Systematically identify, measure, and manage technical debt to make informed decisions about code quality investments.

When to Use

  • Legacy code evaluation
  • Refactoring prioritization
  • Sprint planning
  • Code quality initiatives
  • Acquisition due diligence
  • Architectural decisions

Quick Start

Minimal working example:

interface DebtItem {
  id: string;
  title: string;
  description: string;
  category: "code" | "architecture" | "test" | "documentation" | "security";
  severity: "low" | "medium" | "high" | "critical";
  effort: number; // hours
  impact: number; // 1-10 scale
  interest: number; // cost per sprint if not fixed
}

class TechnicalDebtAssessment {
  private items: DebtItem[] = [];

  addDebtItem(item: DebtItem): void {
    this.items.push(item);
  }

  calculatePriority(item: DebtItem): number {
    const severityWeight = {
      low: 1,
      medium: 2,
      high: 3,
      critical: 4,
    };
// ... (see reference guides for full implementation)

Reference Guides

Detailed implementations in the references/ directory:

| Guide | Contents | |---|---| | Technical Debt Calculator | Technical Debt Calculator | | Code Quality Scanner | Code Quality Scanner |

Best Practices

✅ DO

  • Quantify debt impact
  • Prioritize by ROI
  • Track debt over time
  • Include debt in sprints
  • Document debt decisions
  • Set quality gates

❌ DON'T

  • Ignore technical debt
  • Fix everything at once
  • Skip impact analysis
  • Make emotional decisions