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remove-technical-debt

Guided journey from a large aged codebase everyone fears to touch to one that is safe to change, legible, bounded, and resilient - paid down in place without a rewrite. Orchestrates eight skills phase by phase - working-with-legacy-code, refactoring-patterns, clean-code, software-design-philosophy, clean-architecture, pragmatic-programmer, release-it, domain-driven-design - asking the user questions at every decision point and recording results in the project docs/ folder (TESTING.md, TECH-DEBT.md, REMOVE-TECHNICAL-DEBT-PLAN.md) so the journey resumes across sessions. Use when the user wants to tame a legacy codebase, pay down technical debt safely, avoid a big-bang rewrite, or says 'we are afraid to touch this code'. For a fresh vibe-coded prototype, improve-code-quality; for greenfield structure, design-code-architecture; for a product-and-UX pass, improve-app; to optimize a working codebase for speed, architecture-optimization. For one framework in isolation, invoke that skill directly.

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# Remove Technical Debt

Take a large, aged, tangled codebase that everyone is afraid to touch and pay its debt down in place — no big-bang rewrite, the old system always shipping. The instinct to rewrite is the one reliable way to turn a struggling-but-shipping product into a struggling-and-not-shipping one; this journey is the alternative. It is interactive and resumable across eight phases: the agent asks before every decision and records the outcome in your project's `docs/` folder, so you can stop after any phase and pick up later. The first phase builds a safety net at your change points; every phase after it is verifiable because that net exists.

## Core Principle

**Feedback over fear: cover and modify, never edit and pray — pay debt down in place on the paths you actually walk, and never stop shipping.** This skill sequences the phases, asks the decision questions, and records every choice in `docs/`. The constituent skills carry the method — invoke them rather than improvising their frameworks. You do not pay down a mountain of debt by rebuilding the mountain; you pay it down one safe, tested step at a time along the paths you already change. Skipping ahead — cleaning before the safety net, splitting services before the boundaries are real — is the exact failure mode this ordering exists to prevent.

## Journey Map

| Phase | Skill | Question it answers | Artifact |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | working-with-legacy-code | Can I change this code without breaking it unknowingly, and where do I start? | Creates docs/TESTING.md + docs/TECH-DEBT.md — GATE |
| 2 | refactoring-patterns | Can I reshape structure without changing behavior? | Extends docs/TECH-DEBT.md |