Workflow Maintenance

Tech Debt Cleanup

Structured workflow for addressing accumulated technical debt

maintenancetech-debtcleanup
CLAUDE.md

When addressing technical debt:

  1. Identify the debt: scan for TODO/FIXME comments, skipped tests, known workarounds, and suppressed warnings.
  2. Prioritize by impact: what debt causes the most bugs, slows development the most, or blocks future work?
  3. Address one piece of debt per PR. Don’t bundle unrelated cleanups.
  4. Add or fix tests before cleaning up the code.
  5. Clean up the code. Remove workarounds, fix the underlying issue, update patterns to current standards.
  6. Run the full test suite to verify no regressions.
  7. Remove the TODO/FIXME comment when the debt is resolved.

Copy this workflow into your CLAUDE.md or agent config file so your agent follows this process automatically.

get crystl