Tech debt assessment that identifies, classifies, and prioritizes maintainability problems — helping teams build a refactoring roadmap — drawing on twelve classic engineering books. Triggers when: user asks about tech debt, refactoring priorities, what to clean up first, or asks "why is this so hard to change?", "what should we fix first?", or "how do I justify refactoring to management?". Do NOT trigger for: server health checks, HTTP /health endpoints, Kubernetes probes, database health, or application uptime — "health" in those contexts is infrastructure, not code quality. Also not for sing
Use brooks-debt to assess the codebase area I identify. Scan for the six decay risks, classify debt intent, and prioritize findings using Pain × Spread. Group findings by decay risk and include the Debt Summary Table so I can decide what to refactor first. Provide an assessment without changing files.
Required inputs
A specific module, directory, or related group of files to assess
Context about maintenance pain and the scope of affected code
The skill's referenced shared framework and debt-guide.md must be available
Previously published starter task based on a pinned source version; check the source and required inputs before running. Task evidence ↗
SKILL.md
name: brooks-debtdescription: > Tech debt assessment that identifies, classifies, and prioritizes maintainability problems — helping teams build a refactoring roadmap — drawing on twelve classic engineering books. Triggers when: user asks about tech debt, refactoring priorities, what to clean up first, or asks "why is this so hard to change?", "what should we fix first?", or "how do I justify refactoring to management?". Do NOT trigger for: server health checks, HTTP /health endpoints, Kubernetes probes, database health, or application uptime — "health" in those contexts is infrastructure, not code quality. Also not for single-function refactoring questions.metadata: opencode/slash: "true"
Brooks-Lint — Tech Debt Assessment
Setup
Read in order:
../_shared/common.md — Iron Law, Project Config, Report Template, Health Score
../_shared/source-coverage.md — book coverage, exceptions, tradeoffs
../_shared/decay-risks.md — symptom definitions and source attributions
debt-guide.md (this directory) — the debt classification framework
Process
Scope: if the user did not describe the codebase or point to specific areas, apply
Auto Scope Detection (../_shared/common.md) first.
Scan for all six decay risks (Step 1 of the guide); list every finding before scoring
Apply the Pain × Spread priority formula and classify debt intent (Steps 2–3 of the guide)
Group findings by decay risk (Step 4 of the guide)
Output using the Report Template from common.md, plus the Debt Summary Table