Core Debt Skill

The Job

The core skill gives an agent a strict definition of technical debt: future cost created by a design, contract, workflow, test, or operational choice. It keeps the review away from style noise and vague smell-hunting.

Use it when:

You need a second pass after normal checks pass, especially before merging changes that affect boundaries, tests, deploys, upgrades, ownership, or cross-module behavior.

What It Looks For

Hidden contracts

Call order, magic names, setup rituals, lifecycle assumptions, or fixture knowledge that production code never states.

Brittle tests

Tests that assert choreography while the real user, queue, database, or integration path can still break.

Unsafe dynamic behavior

Runtime-only assumptions around shapes, strings, globals, configuration, and external data.

Release friction

Deploy, rollback, migration, environment, and upgrade traps that turn ordinary changes into incident bait.

What It Ignores

Formatting, broad refactor sermons, duplicate static-analysis findings, taste complaints, and clever rewrites with no clear payoff. Those do not become useful because the agent says them with confidence.

Finding Shape

P2: Order state lives as loose strings
type: code
future cost: new states drift across policies
evidence: string literals drive transitions
smallest useful fix: add an enum boundary
ignore if: throwaway import code

Review Prompt

Review this diff with the Vølven core debt skill.
Focus on future maintenance cost, hidden contracts, brittle tests,
unsafe dynamic behavior, deploy friction, upgrade friction, and trapped knowledge.
Ignore style, generic smells, and duplicate tool findings.
Findings first, ordered by severity. Max 7 bullets.

Debt is future cost, not ugliness.