Engineering

Skill 39 of 200

Tech Debt

Identify, categorize, and prioritize technical debt.

1 minute · 148 words · 4 sections

Install

$ npx skills add anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins --skill tech-debt

$ npx skills add anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins

» /plugin marketplace add anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins

The first command installs just this skill, by the name in its SKILL.md; the second installs the whole repository.

Tech Debt Management

Systematically identify, categorize, and prioritize technical debt.

Type	Examples	Risk
Code debt	Duplicated logic, poor abstractions, magic numbers	Bugs, slow development
Architecture debt	Monolith that should be split, wrong data store	Scaling limits
Test debt	Low coverage, flaky tests, missing integration tests	Regressions ship
Dependency debt	Outdated libraries, unmaintained dependencies	Security vulns
Documentation debt	Missing runbooks, outdated READMEs, tribal knowledge	Onboarding pain
Infrastructure debt	Manual deploys, no monitoring, no IaC	Incidents, slow recovery

Prioritization Framework

Score each item on:

Impact: How much does it slow the team down? (1-5)
Risk: What happens if we don’t fix it? (1-5)
Effort: How hard is the fix? (1-5, inverted — lower effort = higher priority)

Priority = (Impact + Risk) x (6 - Effort)

Output

Produce a prioritized list with estimated effort, business justification for each item, and a phased remediation plan that can be done alongside feature work.

About this skill

Trigger

Identify, categorize, and prioritize technical debt. Trigger with "tech debt", "technical debt audit", "what should we refactor", "code health", or when the user asks about code quality, refactoring priorities, or maintenance backlog.

The verbatim description from this skill’s front matter — the string an agent matches on to decide whether to load it.

Colophon for this issue

Colophon

How this issue was made

Source

github.com/anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins, branch main, last pushed 23 September 2026.

Licence

Apache-2.0 — the text of every skill is reproduced unmodified, frontmatter included, under the upstream licence.

Discovery

200 skills found by walking the repository tree for SKILL.md, not by matching a directory convention. 27 distinct layouts observed: bio-research/skills/*/SKILL.md, cowork-plugin-management/skills/*/SKILL.md, customer-support/skills/*/SKILL.md, data/skills/*/SKILL.md, design/skills/*/SKILL.md, engineering/skills/*/SKILL.md, enterprise-search/skills/*/SKILL.md, finance/skills/*/SKILL.md, human-resources/skills/*/SKILL.md, legal/skills/*/SKILL.md, marketing/skills/*/SKILL.md, operations/skills/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/apollo/skills/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/brand-voice/skills/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/common-room/skills/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/slack/skills/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/zoom-plugin/skills/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/zoom-plugin/skills/contact-center/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/zoom-plugin/skills/meeting-sdk/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/zoom-plugin/skills/meeting-sdk/web/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/zoom-plugin/skills/video-sdk/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/zoom-plugin/skills/virtual-agent/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/zoom-plugin/skills/zoom-mcp/*/SKILL.md, pdf-viewer/skills/*/SKILL.md, product-management/skills/*/SKILL.md, productivity/skills/*/SKILL.md, sales/skills/*/SKILL.md.

Issue colours

Resolved from the awesome-design-md registry — hue 39°, chroma 0.113. Two accent tones are generated per issue and each is proven against its own ground before it ships: a single accent that passes AA on both light and dark paper is arithmetically impossible.

Typefaces

Display: Copernicus is not available to us; set in Newsreader.

We never load a typeface at request time from a third-party origin, so a brand face we do not already self-host is substituted rather than fetched.

Heading repairs

1 repair applied to this skill so the document has one h1 and no skipped levels:

Shifted “4 headings” from h1 to h2 so the skill title is the only h1.

Spec compliance

53 editorial notes across 41 of 200 skills. They are printed in the margin of each skill rather than as errors here.

and 31 more.

Images

Images inside a skill come from the upstream repository. Where the author gave no alternative text we mark the image decorative rather than inventing a description — a plausible caption we made up is worse than none for the reader who depends on it.

Marketplace

A plugin manifest is published at .claude-plugin/marketplace.json by Anthropic, declaring 120 plugins. It is read for editorial metadata only — never as the skill index, which is always the repository tree.

Signal

Install counts come from skills.sh. They measure downloads, not quality, and an unranked repository is not an unread one.

Agent surfaces

The whole issue is available as one markdown document at /anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins.md, and each skill at its own .md URL.

Publication

Set by Skills Docs from the source repository. Body text is Literata at the reader’s chosen size and measure; code is Geist Mono. Nothing on this page was written by us except this paragraph.

Tech Debt Management

Systematically identify, categorize, and prioritize technical debt.

Type	Examples	Risk
Code debt	Duplicated logic, poor abstractions, magic numbers	Bugs, slow development
Architecture debt	Monolith that should be split, wrong data store	Scaling limits
Test debt	Low coverage, flaky tests, missing integration tests	Regressions ship
Dependency debt	Outdated libraries, unmaintained dependencies	Security vulns
Documentation debt	Missing runbooks, outdated READMEs, tribal knowledge	Onboarding pain
Infrastructure debt	Manual deploys, no monitoring, no IaC	Incidents, slow recovery

Prioritization Framework

Score each item on:

Impact: How much does it slow the team down? (1-5)
Risk: What happens if we don’t fix it? (1-5)
Effort: How hard is the fix? (1-5, inverted — lower effort = higher priority)

Priority = (Impact + Risk) x (6 - Effort)

Output

Produce a prioritized list with estimated effort, business justification for each item, and a phased remediation plan that can be done alongside feature work.

Tech Debt

Tech Debt Management

Categories

Prioritization Framework

Output

About this skill

Trigger

Colophon

Tech Debt

Tech Debt Management

Categories

Prioritization Framework

Output

About this skill

Trigger

Colophon