DEV Community

Cover image for debt-ops: catching AI-written tech debt the moment it's written
Brandin Canfield
Brandin Canfield

Posted on • Originally published at brandincanfield.com

debt-ops: catching AI-written tech debt the moment it's written

A plugin that catches the tech debt your AI agent writes, the moment it writes it.

GitClear's study of 211M lines shows the pattern: duplicated code keeps climbing and it's not being refactored.

And if you've spent enough time coding with agents, you've felt this pain.

So I ran a study on ~20 years of tech-debt research, distilled the findings into a few commandments, and wired them into my agent loop as a plugin.

How it works: as your agent writes code, every deferral, a loose type, a punted decision gets logged to a folder in your repo as debt. Every key decision gets logged as an ADR.

It's a passive tracker until YOU decide to pay the debt down. Then the plugin walks you through it the research-backed way.

Works in Claude Code, Codex, Copilot, or anything you can drop an Agent Skill into.


Source: https://github.com/bcanfield/agentic-tech-debt

Top comments (1)

Collapse
 
brandincanfield profile image
Brandin Canfield

let me know in comments - r u getting smoked by ai tech debt?