Assess Legacy & Readiness — refactor-chain · diagnose

Bundle: refactor-chain (self-diagnosing, self-healing fix-it pipeline). Phase: diagnose · Prerequisite: refactor-understand · Next: feeds refactor-diagnose + plan. Adaptivity / conditional: repo-agnostic; anti-pattern set scales to the detected stack — advisory-only.

Purpose

Not every codebase is ready for every refactor. This skill reads the code (never runs or edits it) and grades modernization readiness: it detects the anti-patterns and gaps that determine whether a step is safe and which steps to run at all — tight coupling and hidden new-ing (no seam to test against), missing or loose types, deprecated / end-of-life APIs and runtimes, dead code, and the absence of a test safety net. It produces a readiness verdict with gates — GREEN (go), YELLOW (fix a prerequisite first), RED (blocked until X) — so refactor-diagnose and the plan phase pick a lane and order the code can actually survive.