Remove Technical Debt

Take a large, aged, tangled codebase that everyone is afraid to touch and pay its debt down in place — no big-bang rewrite, the old system always shipping. The instinct to rewrite is the one reliable way to turn a struggling-but-shipping product into a struggling-and-not-shipping one; this journey is the alternative. It is interactive and resumable across eight phases: the agent asks before every decision and records the outcome in your project's docs/ folder, so you can stop after any phase and pick up later. The first phase builds a safety net at your change points; every phase after it is verifiable because that net exists.

Core Principle

Feedback over fear: cover and modify, never edit and pray — pay debt down in place on the paths you actually walk, and never stop shipping. This skill sequences the phases, asks the decision questions, and records every choice in docs/. The constituent skills carry the method — invoke them rather than improvising their frameworks. You do not pay down a mountain of debt by rebuilding the mountain; you pay it down one safe, tested step at a time along the paths you already change. Skipping ahead — cleaning before the safety net, splitting services before the boundaries are real — is the exact failure mode this ordering exists to prevent.

Journey Map