Systematic Codebase Audit & Migration

A structured methodology for tackling codebases with accumulated technical debt. Works in three phases — audit (understand and freeze the problem), migrate (pay it down slice by slice with proof), then closeout (remove residue and prove the repo is actually ready to ship).

Why This Methodology Exists

Agents without structure fail at four things during large refactors:

1. Drift — forgetting what's been done, redoing completed work, or leaving things half-finished across sessions. This wastes time and introduces conflicts.
2. Vestigial code — adding new implementations without deleting what they replace. The codebase grows when it should be shrinking.
3. Intuition-driven confidence — saying "this should work" instead of proving it. When an agent can't point to a deterministic check that passed, its confidence is unfounded.
4. False finish — stopping when the new path works even though temporary adapters, stale docs, orphaned dependencies, or release blockers remain.

Every rule in this methodology prevents one of these four failures. When a rule feels heavy, that's the justification.

Session Protocol