tech-debt-management
Tech Debt Management
Technical debt is a loan against your future velocity. Track it, price it, and pay it down strategically.
Context
Every codebase accumulates technical debt -- shortcuts taken, technologies that aged, architectures that evolved beyond their original design. The problem isn't debt itself (it's sometimes a rational trade-off), but unmanaged debt that silently drains velocity and increases risk.
In a lifecycle-aware system, technical debt should be grounded in evidence. Do not dump every annoyance into a debt bucket. Focus on structural issues that repeatedly show up in reviews, incidents, slow delivery, or brittle coexistence boundaries.
Inputs
- review-report -- produced by the preceding skill in the lifecycle
- retrospective-report -- produced by the preceding skill in the lifecycle
- postmortem-report -- produced by the preceding skill in the lifecycle
Process
Step 1: Identify Debt from Repeated Evidence
More from yknothing/prodcraft
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Use when reviewed requirements or specifications are ready and the team must decide high-level architecture, component boundaries, integration seams, or brownfield coexistence strategy before API design, technology selection, or task planning.
6ci-cd
Use when a reviewed implementation slice needs an automated build, test, and deployment pipeline, especially when brownfield rollback, release-boundary checks, contract/integration gates, and staged delivery must be explicit before shipping.
6intake
The mandatory gateway for all new engineering work. Triage and route new products, apps, features, migrations, tech-debt, or any 'not sure where to start' request to the correct lifecycle path. Use before starting design or implementation. Do not use for ongoing tasks, specific debugging, or PR reviews.
6feature-development
Use when a reviewed task slice has tests or acceptance targets and the team must turn it into a small, mergeable implementation increment without expanding scope, breaking contracts, or hiding release-boundary risk.
6monitoring-observability
Use when a live service or newly delivered release needs actionable telemetry, dashboards, and alerts that expose real user-impactful boundaries, especially when brownfield coexistence rules, unsupported-flow safety, rollback health, or queue/backfill behavior must be visible before incidents escalate.
6incident-response
Use when a live production issue needs coordinated containment, severity triage, stakeholder communication, and evidence capture, especially when a recent release, brownfield coexistence rules, rollback decisions, or unresolved contract boundaries must be handled before root-cause work.
6