Brooks Debt Agent Skill
> Tech debt assessment that identifies, classifies, and prioritizes maintainability problems — helping teams build a refactoring roadmap — drawing on twelve classic engineering books. first, or asks "why is this so hard to change?", "what should we fix first?", or "how do I justify refactoring to management?". database health, or application uptime — "health" in those contexts is infrastructure, not code quality. Also not for single-function refactoring questions.
Install
one command, takes just this skill from the repositorynpx skills add https://github.com/hyhmrright/brooks-lint --skill brooks-debtWhat comes with it
5 315 bytes besides the instructionThe instruction itself
3 sections, as written by the authorBrooks-Lint — Tech Debt Assessment
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 attributionsdebt-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
How to use it
Take hyhmrright/brooks-debt from the repository into ~/.claude/skills for personal
use, or into .claude/skills inside a project.
The agent identifies a skill by the name field in its header. Two skills with the
same name cannot sit side by side — one of them will be ignored.