Assess Technical Debt

Assess Technical Debt

Surface the structural debt that routine review keeps out of scope: long-lived complexity, deprecated APIs, duplication, tangled architecture, and low-value tests that need deliberate refactoring. Project-wide, analysis-only. Ranks each finding by impact and effort and writes .turbo/technical-debt.md and .turbo/technical-debt.html.

Task Tracking

At the start, use update_plan to track each phase, restating any remaining steps of a parent workflow alongside them:

1. Scope and partition
2. Run debt analysis agents
3. Run $evaluate-findings skill
4. Resolve escalated findings
5. Rank and write markdown report
6. Generate HTML report

Step 1: Scope and Partition

If $ARGUMENTS specifies paths, assess those directly (skip the question).

Otherwise, use request_user_input to confirm scope:

• Whole codebase — assess all source and test files
• Specific paths — user provides directories or file patterns

Once scope is determined:

1. Glob for source and test files in the selected scope. Exclude generated and vendored directories (node_modules/, dist/, build/, vendor/, __pycache__/, .build/, DerivedData/, target/, .tox/, and others appropriate to the project).
2. Partition files by top-level directory. If a single directory holds far more files than its siblings, sub-partition it by its immediate subdirectories.

Step 2: Run Debt Analysis Agents

Before dispatching, read the project's test configuration and CI workflow to identify any test tier that resets a shared external resource between tests, such as a database, a fixed port, or a cache. Such tiers have no cross-process interlock, so sub-agents running them concurrently wipe each other's state and return failures that look like real defects. Name any such tier to every sub-agent as off-limits.

Launch the agents below with spawn_agent / wait_agent using inherited model defaults, issuing every call in one batch. Do not issue one and await its result before issuing the rest. Each sub-agent's prompt instructs it to read references/debt-reviewer.md for the debt taxonomy, detection heuristics, the impact/effort rubric, and the finding output format before scanning, and to treat the shared working tree and its git index as read-only — any empirical check runs in an isolated git worktree created under $TMPDIR and discarded afterward. Each sub-agent keeps the scratch files it writes, such as its starting git status snapshot, probes, and logs, in a scratch directory of its own, uniquely named under $TMPDIR, and refers to it by absolute path. HEAD stays where it is: read other refs with git show <ref>:<path> rather than git checkout or git switch. Refer to that worktree by absolute path in every command and join chained steps with &&, so a failed step cannot leave the rest running in the shared checkout. Run teardown and verification as their own commands. Give that worktree its own dependency install rather than reaching the shared tree's install by any route: removing a worktree deletes through symlinks, and a redirected suite writes into the shared install. When its own install is not possible, the check is left unrun and reported as such. Every test runner the sub-agent starts, in a worktree or in the shared checkout, runs in its own process group under a timeout enforced from outside the runner. Before teardown, the sub-agent stops the process group of every runner it started, since stopping a runner can leave the processes it spawned alive. Afterward the sub-agent verifies that git worktree list no longer shows the worktree, that git status --short shows what it showed at the start, that HEAD is still on the branch it started on, and that the shared tree's dependency directory still resolves (a destroyed install leaves git status unchanged, since it is gitignored). It also confirms that no process from those groups, and none whose command line names the worktree path, if any, is still running, and reports by PID any process it could not stop. When it cannot list processes, it reports that check as unrun and names those process groups and the worktree path, if any. Damage the sub-agent cannot repair is reported with the exact repair command in place of findings.

Expect (one per partition, plus one project-wide architecture agent) Codex sub-agent calls total. State the count explicitly before emitting the batch.

• Partition agents — one per partition from Step 1. Each scans its files for complexity hotspots, deprecated API usage, duplication, and low-value tests, and notes coupling it observes reaching outside the partition. Pass the partition's file list and the full project root path.
• Architecture agent — one project-wide pass over the scoped tree for architecture rot: tangled module boundaries, circular dependencies, layering violations, and refactor candidates that span modules. Pass the partition map and the full project root path.

If more partitions exist than fit a single fan-out, group related directories so the partition agents stay within a manageable batch, and note the grouping in the report.

Step 3: Run $evaluate-findings Skill

Aggregate all findings from all agents. Deduplicate items that surface in more than one agent (e.g., duplication a partition agent and the architecture agent both flag). Run the $evaluate-findings skill once on the combined set to verify each finding against the actual code and weed out false positives.