design-debt-audit

design-debt-audit is a skill for Claude Code from Owl-Listener/designer-skills. It costs 59 tokens per session (932 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for finding and prioritising accumulated design inconsistencies and outdated interface patterns. Design debt is work left unresolved that makes a product less consistent, accessible, or easier to extend.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to inventory inconsistent components, repeated interaction styles, outdated interfaces, navigation problems, and known accessibility gaps.
Why use it?
Small design differences and old patterns can multiply across a product and make future changes harder. This turns those issues into a prioritised repair plan.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the design-ops plugin — 9 skills, 3 commands shipped together

Good fit Use it to inventory inconsistent components, repeated interaction styles, outdated interfaces, navigation problems, and known accessibility gaps.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/owl-listener/designer-skills/design-debt-audit
About the project

Owl-Listener/designer-skills is a collection of AI-agent skills, commands, and plugins for design work, covering research, design systems, interfaces, interaction, and delivery. Designers and developers use it inside coding assistants to guide design tasks, and the catalogue entries represent selected parts of that larger collection.

Owl-Listener/designer-skills · 2,619 stars · on GitHub

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 Owl-Listener/designer-skills --skill design-debt-audit
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Owl-Listener/designer-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install design-ops, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 9 skills, 3 commands.

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 design-debt-audit

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/owl-listener/designer-skills/design-debt-audit/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/owl-listener/designer-skills/design-debt-audit)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/owl-listener/designer-skills/design-debt-audit"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/owl-listener/designer-skills/design-debt-audit/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 design-debt-audit

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/owl-listener/designer-skills/design-debt-audit"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/owl-listener/designer-skills/design-debt-audit.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 59 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 932 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. Third-party audits
  • Socket pass 6 May 2026
  • Snyk pass 6 May 2026
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 $0.00059 $0.00932
Opus 5 $0.00030 $0.00466
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00186
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00093

Measured 12d ago against content hash b60f34ff9b88, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

design-debt-audit 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 12d 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.

Origin

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

design-ops/skills/design-debt-audit/SKILL.md · 73 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 73 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Design Debt Audit

You are an expert in systematically identifying and triaging design debt before it becomes structural.

What You Do

You conduct design debt audits that surface inconsistencies, outdated patterns, accessibility gaps, and structural problems — and produce a prioritized remediation plan that teams can act on.

What Counts as Design Debt

Design debt is any gap between the current state of the product and the standard it should meet. Categories:

Visual Inconsistency Debt

  • Components that exist in the product but deviate from the design system (wrong color, spacing, type)
  • Multiple visual treatments for the same interaction (three different button styles doing the same thing)
  • Legacy UI that predates the current design system and hasn't been updated

Structural Debt

  • Patterns that were designed for an earlier version of the product and don't scale to current complexity
  • Navigation that has been patched with new items and no longer reflects the underlying IA
  • Features that were added without holistic design, creating isolated islands in the product

Accessibility Debt

  • Known WCAG violations that haven't been fixed
  • Components that work visually but fail with assistive technology
  • Missing keyboard navigation, focus management, or screen reader support

Documentation Debt

  • Components in use that aren't in the design system
  • Specs that don't match implementation
  • Design decisions that exist only in someone's head

Technical/Implementation Debt (design-relevant)

  • Designs that were implemented with hardcoded values instead of tokens
  • Components that were built differently across platforms (iOS, Android, web) without a documented reason

Audit Process

1. Scope and Inventory

  • Define audit scope: full product, one feature area, or one platform
  • Screenshot every screen/state in scope
  • Catalog by screen type, component type, or user flow

2. Classify Debt

For each screen or component, tag:

  • Severity: Critical (accessibility violation, major inconsistency) / Moderate (visual inconsistency, outdated pattern) / Minor (polish, edge case)
  • Category: Visual / Structural / Accessibility / Documentation / Implementation
  • Frequency: How many times does this issue appear?
  • Effort to fix: Low / Medium / High (rough engineering estimate)

Read the full file on GitHub · 73 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. 12d ago First seen · 73 lines · 59 tokens per session scan A b60f34ff9b88

Subscribe to this mod's changes

design-debt-audit is a skill published in the GitHub repository Owl-Listener/designer-skills (2,619 stars, last pushed 6d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 59 tokens to every session and 932 once invoked, about $0.0003 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 2026-08-30.

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