| name | orca-legacy |
| description | Audit, enrich, and plan safe modernization for legacy or under-documented systems. |
ORCA Framework Legacy
What This Skill Is
A legacy modernization workflow for understanding inherited systems and planning staged, verifiable change.
Trigger
Use for old, messy, under-documented, inherited, or fragile systems where the risk is understanding and preserving behavior.
Do Not Trigger
Do not use as a license for a broad rewrite or dependency sweep.
Required Inputs
- Repository, module, system, or work item
- Modernization goal or pain point
Optional Inputs
- Known risky flows
- Existing docs
- Test commands
- Runtime or deployment context
Exact Workflow
- Read the work item and existing docs.
- Perform repo archaeology before proposing changes.
- Map modules, dependencies, call chains, and key flows.
- Extract business logic and undocumented assumptions.
- Identify test gaps, fragile areas, and migration risks.
- Produce a legacy audit and risk report.
- Draft a modernization spec for the first safe slice.
- Recommend regression tasks that preserve important behavior.
Expected Outputs
- Filled
templates/legacy-audit.md
- Filled
templates/legacy-risk-report.md
- Filled
templates/modernization-spec.md
Quality Bar
The output should make the legacy system safer to change without pretending it is fully understood.
Common Failure Modes
- rewriting before mapping behavior
- treating missing tests as permission to change freely
- deleting suspected dead code without runtime evidence
- modernizing dependencies without understanding call chains
Relationship To Other ORCA Framework Skills And Commands
Feeds orca-spec, orca-plan, orca-regression-task, orca-review, and QA workflows.