brooks-debt

name

brooks-debt

description

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.

Brooks-Lint — Tech Debt Assessment

Setup

Read in order:

1. ../_shared/common.md — Iron Law, Project Config, Report Template, Health Score
2. ../_shared/source-coverage.md — book coverage, exceptions, tradeoffs
3. ../_shared/decay-risks.md — symptom definitions and source attributions
4. 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.

1. Scan for all six decay risks (Step 1 of the guide); list every finding before scoring
2. Apply the Pain × Spread priority formula and classify debt intent (Steps 2–3 of the guide)
3. Group findings by decay risk (Step 4 of the guide)
4. Output using the Report Template from common.md, plus the Debt Summary Table

Mode line in report: Tech Debt Assessment