Map the Debt — refactor-chain · understand/diagnose

Bundle: refactor-chain (self-diagnosing, self-healing fix-it pipeline). Phase: understand/diagnose · Prerequisite: refactor-understand · Next: feeds refactor-diagnose + plan. Adaptivity / conditional: repo-agnostic; depth scales with repo size — advisory-only.

Purpose

A refactor is only as good as knowing where to point it. This skill reads the code (never runs or edits it) and builds three overlapping views: a dependency graph (what imports what), a coupling assessment (which modules are tangled together / where the cycles are), and a hotspot ranking (files that are both large/complex and change often — the places where debt actually costs you). The result is an evidence-ranked "start here" list handed to the diagnostic engine and the plan phase, so effort lands on the highest-pain, highest-leverage code first.