Brooks-Lint — Tech Debt Assessment

SkillDev tools

Tech debt assessment that identifies, classifies, and prioritizes maintainability problems, helping teams build a refactoring roadmap, drawing on twelve classic engineering books. Triggers when: user asks about tech debt, refactoring priorities, what to clean up first, or asks "why is this so hard to change?", "what should we fix first?", or "how do I justify refactoring to management?". Do NOT trigger for: server health checks, HTTP /health endpoints, Kubernetes probes, database health, or application uptime, "health" in those contexts is infrastructure, not code quality. Also not for single-function refactoring questions.

Instructions available. Your AI can read the instructions. Execution depends on the setup they require.

Account requirements not reviewed. Check the skill instructions before use; ahel provides instructions and does not run this skill.

Add ahel to your AI once: Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Claude Code or Codex. Then ask it to use this.

Then ask your AI: use the Brooks-Lint skill

What this skill tells your AI

The instructions your AI receives, as published by hyhmrright/brooks-lint in skills/brooks-debt/SKILL.md and read by ahel’s review.

Setup

Read in order:

../_shared/common.md — Iron Law, Project Config, Report Template, Health Score
../_shared/source-coverage.md — book coverage, exceptions, tradeoffs
../_shared/decay-risks.md — symptom definitions and source attributions
debt-guide.md (this directory) — the debt classification framework

Process

Scope: if the user did not describe the codebase or point to specific areas, apply Auto Scope Detection (../_shared/common.md) first.

Scan for all six decay risks (Step 1 of the guide); list every finding before scoring
Apply the Pain × Spread priority formula and classify debt intent (Steps 2–3 of the guide)
Group findings by decay risk (Step 4 of the guide)
Output using the Report Template from common.md, plus the Debt Summary Table

Mode line in report: Tech Debt Assessment

Signals

GitHub stars: 2k
Forks: 69
Last commit: Sep 2026

Others that do the same job

brooks-debt
Skill · hashgraph-online

Advanced

Item type: skill
Key: brooks-debt-hyhmrright
Source: github.com/hyhmrright/brooks-lint

github.com/hyhmrright/brooks-lint