technical-debt-management SKILL.md skillA
technical-debt-management from cbrock84/headcount is an agent skill: a SKILL.md folder an AI agent loads when a task calls for it.
mdr add cbrock84/headcount/technical-debt-management@git:20260916.e72e404Pins git:20260916.e72e404 in mdr.lock. Pin the fingerprint instead.
- Audit grade
- A, 17 of 17 checks passed
- Kind
- SKILL.md skill
- Repository
- cbrock84/headcount
- Path
plugins/technology/skills/technical-debt-management/SKILL.md- Versions recorded
- 3
- Latest version
- git:20260916.e72e404, committed Sep 16, 2026
- First version recorded
- Aug 29, 2026
- Size
- 3,334 bytes
- Repository stars
- 2,543
- License
- MIT
Makes technical debt visible and decidable — distinguishing real debt from mess, quantifying its cost, and arguing for remediation in business terms. Use this to assess and prioritize debt, decide whether to fix or live with something, justify remediation work to non-engineers, or plan a migration off a system nobody wants to touch.
Collected from public GitHub. Every version is saved exactly as it was and never changes. Install it at an exact version with the mdr tool, and every file is checked before it reaches your agent. The main file is checked against the SHA-256 fingerprint recorded here, and the others against the fingerprints GitHub keeps for its source commit. The automatic checks below grade the latest version, and the same checks always give the same file the same grade.
What the file says
# Technical debt management Debt is a deliberate trade: taking on future cost to move faster now. Most of what gets called debt is not that — it is mess, which was never a decision, or drift, where the world moved and the code did not. The distinction matters because the arguments and remedies differ. ## Classify before prioritizing - **Deliberate debt** — a known shortcut with a reason. Has a principal and interest. Legitimate. - **Mess** — nobody chose it; it accumulated. No trade was made, so there is nothing to defend. - **Drift** — the code was right for a context that has changed. Neither shortcut nor carelessness. - **Not debt at all** — code someone dislikes, or would have written differently. Taste is not debt, and rewriting on taste is how remediation budgets get spent with nothing to show. ## Cost is a rate, not a total Debt matters proportional to how often you pay it. Ugly code in a module nobody has touched in three years costs nothing; a moderate awkwardness in the file every feature crosses costs continuously. Measure by contact: change frequency, how long changes there take relative to elsewhere, how often …
Read the whole file at its exact version.
How to install
mdr add cbrock84/headcount/technical-debt-management@sha256:ea084a0aa6fff2b3The line at the top of this page pins the label git:20260916.e72e404, which is what most people want. This one pins the sha256 fingerprint of the contents instead, so it survives a label being moved. Either way the exact version is written to mdr.lock, and mdr install downloads and checks those contents again, so it installs them exactly or stops with an error.
[](https://markdownregistry.com/a/art_y27c6gpq63mvtzpl)
5 badge image fetches in 30 days. What the badge shows.
Versions
The registry has recorded 3 versions of this file, between Aug 29, 2026 and Sep 16, 2026, about one every 9 days.
| version | committed | commit | size | audit | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| git:20260916.e72e404 latest | 2026-09-16 | e72e404 | 3,334 B | A | view · diff |
| git:20260829.2464776 | 2026-08-29 | 2464776 | 2,995 B | A | view · diff |
| git:20260829.3b7c308 | 2026-08-29 | 3b7c308 | 2,996 B | A | view |
Audit of the latest version
- pass: Frontmatter block present
- pass: Frontmatter declares a name
- pass: Frontmatter declares a description
- pass: Size between 200 bytes and 200 KB (3334 bytes)
- pass: No zero-width or bidi control characters
- pass: No instruction hidden inside an HTML comment
- pass: No link to an exfiltration or paste host
- pass: No credential-shaped string
- pass: No instruction to send local credentials anywhere
- pass: No text hidden with inline styles
- pass: No prompt-injection phrasing
- pass: No curl or wget piped into a shell
- pass: No recursive delete of root, home or parent
- pass: No instruction to read or print local credentials
- pass: No base64 blob over 200 characters
- pass: No link to a raw IP address
- pass: No script tag
Source
cbrock84/headcount · 2,543 stars · license MIT · pushed 2026-10-18 · branch main
API
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/artifacts/art_y27c6gpq63mvtzpl GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/resolve?ref=cbrock84/headcount/technical-debt-management GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/blob/ea084a0aa6fff2b36b927f13574ab28510b3eb819f3bbb3c4fb1bcfa29db673c
Your AI assistant does the legwork. You hear about the deals worth your word. Hand yours the standing instructions at modelranch.com and it joins the network that reads files like this one.
Guides: the SKILL.md format and its required fields · what to check before you install a skill · how to pin a skill to an exact version · where to find agent skills · keeping a team on the same skills · which agent file does what.