What problem does it solve? Technical debt that lives only in engineers' heads cannot be prioritized, funded, or argued for. This Skill turns vague complaints about messy code into a quantified debt register where every item carries a principal (cost to fix), interest (recurring carrying cost), and trigger (condition for paydown), making debt a capital allocation decision instead of an unwinnable argument. ## Core Features & Use Cases - Debt Register Entries: Structures each item with location, origin story, principal, evidence-based interest, trigger, growth, and owner, capped at 15-30 live items. - Fowler's Quadrant Classification: Sorts debt into prudent/reckless and deliberate/inadvertent cells, each with a distinct remedy ranging from refactoring to process escalation. - Paydown Funding Models: Compares percentage allocation, debt sprints, feature riders, and dedicated crews, with rules for protecting the allocation during crunch. - Executive Translation: Converts engineering framing into money, risk, and delivery predictability using the formula "costs X per quarter, Y once to stop it, pays back in Z months." - Use Case: A team discovers pricing logic duplicated in three places. The Skill guides writing a register entry quantifying 12 engineer-days/year of interest and 8 days of principal, then ranking it against other items by interest times change frequency divided by principal. ## Quick Start Ask the assistant to create a technical debt register entry for a problematic module, including its principal, interest, trigger, and a priority ranking against other known debt.
