technical-debt-register

technical-debt-register is a skill for Claude Code from cnfeat/top-pm-skills. It costs 89 tokens per session (3,136 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A structured register of technical debt, meaning shortcuts or outdated parts of a codebase that make future work slower or riskier. It records their business impact, estimated effort, priority, and suggested way to resolve them.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to audit legacy code, missing tests, old dependencies, architectural shortcuts, manual processes, observability gaps, or security backlogs, then plan debt reduction.
Why use it?
It makes hidden maintenance costs visible and helps teams decide which problems are worth fixing first instead of keeping an unprioritized complaint list.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the pm-engineering plugin — 37 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to audit legacy code, missing tests, old dependencies, architectural shortcuts, manual processes, observability gaps, or security backlogs, then plan debt reduction.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/cnfeat/top-pm-skills/technical-debt-register
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add cnfeat/top-pm-skills --skill technical-debt-register
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/cnfeat/top-pm-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install pm-engineering, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 37 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for technical-debt-register

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cnfeat/top-pm-skills/technical-debt-register/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/cnfeat/top-pm-skills/technical-debt-register)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/cnfeat/top-pm-skills/technical-debt-register"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cnfeat/top-pm-skills/technical-debt-register/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for technical-debt-register

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/cnfeat/top-pm-skills/technical-debt-register"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cnfeat/top-pm-skills/technical-debt-register.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 89 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,136 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00089 $0.03136
Opus 5 $0.00044 $0.01568
Sonnet 5 $0.00018 $0.00627
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00314

Measured 9d ago against content hash 6718b0e41da5, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

technical-debt-register scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 9d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

参考skill/pm-claude-skills-main/pm-claude-skills-main/plugins/pm-engineering/skills/technical-debt-register/SKILL.md · 269 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 269 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Technical Debt Register Skill

Produce a complete technical debt register for a team or service. A debt register is not a complaint list — it is a prioritized, business-impact-aware inventory that lets an engineering team make deliberate choices about which debt to pay down, in what order, and with what expected return.

Good debt management is not eliminating all debt. It is ensuring debt is visible, owned, and resolved when the interest cost exceeds the cost of fixing it.

Required Inputs

Ask for these if not already provided:

  • Team or service name — what team and/or service this register covers
  • Known debt items — list of known technical debt, or ask Claude to elicit them by asking about: legacy code, missing tests, outdated dependencies, architectural shortcuts, manual processes, observability gaps, security backlogs
  • Tech stack — language, frameworks, infrastructure (helps Claude categorise and score items correctly)
  • Team size and velocity — number of engineers and approximate story points or days per sprint (needed for effort estimates)
  • Current quarter / planning period — so the roadmap targets the right timeframe

Output Format


Technical Debt Register: [Team / Service Name]

Team: [Name] | Service(s): [Name(s)] Author: [Name] | Last updated: [Date] Planning period: [Q[X] [Year]] | Review cadence: [Monthly / Quarterly]


Overview

[2–3 sentences describing the team's current debt situation, the main categories of debt, and the business context — e.g. are they in a growth phase where velocity matters, or approaching a compliance deadline where security debt is critical?]

Total items in register: [X] Unresolved items: [X] Critical/High priority items: [X] Estimated total resolution effort: [X story points / X engineer-weeks]


Debt Category Definitions

Category Description Examples
Code quality Code that works but is hard to change safely Duplicated logic, deeply nested conditionals, inconsistent error handling, missing abstraction
Architecture Structural decisions that limit scalability or increase coupling Monolith that should be decomposed, sync calls that should be async, missing domain boundaries
Testing Gaps in test coverage that increase regression risk Missing unit tests, no integration tests, flaky test suite, no test data management
Security Known vulnerabilities or missing security controls Outdated dependencies with CVEs, missing rate limiting, hard-coded secrets, insufficient auth
Dependencies Outdated or risky external dependencies End-of-life libraries, major version lag, abandoned packages
Infrastructure Infrastructure that limits reliability or developer productivity Manual deployment steps, no IaC, single-AZ, missing autoscaling
Observability Gaps in visibility that slow incident response Missing metrics, no distributed tracing, poor log structure, no alerting on key SLIs
Process Manual or error-prone operational processes Manual DB migrations, no runbooks, tribal knowledge not documented

Read the full file on GitHub · 269 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 9d ago First seen · 269 lines · 89 tokens per session scan A 6718b0e41da5

Subscribe to this mod's changes

technical-debt-register is a skill published in the GitHub repository cnfeat/top-pm-skills (48 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 89 tokens to every session and 3,136 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

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