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Technical Debt Inventory

Ranks debt by the interest it actually charges per sprint, rather than by how much it offends whoever found it.

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CategoryCodingForDevelopers, Operators, FoundersTested onClaudeChatGPT

Running it, start to finish

  1. Estimate the days per quarter each item actually costs.
  2. Re-rank against what the roadmap will touch.
  3. Start with the high-interest cheap wins.

What you get back

The output this produces, every time.

  • Ranks by interest paid per quarter rather than by how bad the code looks.
  • Multiplies by the roadmap, since debt under upcoming work costs repeatedly and debt elsewhere costs nothing.
  • Names what to accept permanently, which stops it being re-argued every quarter.

Getting better results

Where this usually goes wrong, and how to avoid it.

  • Deprioritise the merely ugly. It is the largest category and it consumes the argument. Stable untouched code charges no interest however offensive it is.
  • Count the blocked work. Features nobody proposed because everyone knew what they would involve are the largest and most invisible cost.
  • Do the cheap wins first. They buy the credibility needed to get time for the big one, and they are usually undersold.

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Written for The AI University. Every prompt in this library is original work — authored, tested and revised here, not collected from elsewhere. 365 of them, free with an account.