Technical Debt Register Skill

Produce a complete technical debt register for a team or service. A debt register is not a complaint list — it is a prioritized, business-impact-aware inventory that lets an engineering team make deliberate choices about which debt to pay down, in what order, and with what expected return.

Good debt management is not eliminating all debt. It is ensuring debt is visible, owned, and resolved when the interest cost exceeds the cost of fixing it.

Required Inputs

Ask for these if not already provided:

• Team or service name — what team and/or service this register covers
• Known debt items — list of known technical debt, or ask Claude to elicit them by asking about: legacy code, missing tests, outdated dependencies, architectural shortcuts, manual processes, observability gaps, security backlogs
• Tech stack — language, frameworks, infrastructure (helps Claude categorise and score items correctly)
• Team size and velocity — number of engineers and approximate story points or days per sprint (needed for effort estimates)
• Current quarter / planning period — so the roadmap targets the right timeframe

Output Format