Review Tech Debt (internal)

Composed by review-change / product-audit within their conversation — on any agent, follow this file inline as the routed step. Findings only; never edits, never refactors.

Scope

The caller's synthesized findings table (the fused, classified decision table). This pass does not rescan the diff: debt-shaped findings are already in the table, and every ownership decision already happened in the finder axes (review-code, review-verify, …). State the scope — the change the table was synthesized over — at the top of the returned table.

Transform (evaluate EVERY row — none is optional; n/a must be stated)

Turn the table's tech-debt-shaped rows (TODO/FIXME/HACK, duplication, stale or orphaned abstractions, dead code, complexity hotspots, missing tests, workarounds pinned to upstream fixes) into explicit, payable debt items:

✓ Restate each debt-shaped finding at file:line with what it defers ✓ Attribute it to the axis already recorded in the table — never re-litigate ownership ✓ Confirm every debt item carries a TRIGGER: the condition under which it must be paid (e.g. "3rd consumer appears", ">100k rows") — a debt item without a trigger is itself a finding. Scheduled deletions carry their trigger as the removal condition (S8: review-debt items become scheduled deletions whose TRIGGER names the removal — executable by a fold batch, not archival prose). ✓ Verify no current-unit debt was mislabeled non-blocking: current-unit work cannot be postpone/tradeoff/wontfix — a table showing one is flagged back to the classifier, never reclassified here ✓ Honor the dead-code exception: staged/planned code cross-checked against the roadmap/SPEC/TASKS is not dead code — mark verify when unsure, never assert ✓ Deletion route. A debt item that proposes removal of a surface carries route: fix-now (delete), not route: fix-now (repair). The TRIGGER specifies what proves the surface is safe to remove (e.g. "no consumer in grep <scope> returns >0").

Return exactly

Sev and Impact are the two published closed sets (BLOCKER | CRITICAL | WARNING | SUGGESTION and blocking | docs-only | report-only); their meanings are owned by review-implementation (CLASSIFY.md §Severity ladder) — assign a token, never a prose grade.

REVIEW TECH DEBT — scope: <scope>

| # | Finding | Sev | Impact | Evidence | Suggested fix |
|---|---------|-----|--------|----------|---------------|
| 1 | <what>  | BLOCKER|CRITICAL|WARNING|SUGGESTION | blocking|docs-only|report-only | <file:line> | <trigger + smallest action> |

Rows: <n> transformed, <n> with trigger, <n> findings, <n> n/a (<which + why>)
Summary: <1-2 sentences>
Decision: PASS | FAIL

For this pass, the Suggested fix column carries the TRIGGER — the condition under which the debt must be paid — alongside the smallest action.

FAIL if any BLOCKER, CRITICAL or WARNING finding is open; PASS otherwise. SUGGESTION findings never block — they surface in the caller's report as debt notes.

Done when

• Every debt-shaped row of the synthesized table was transformed with evidence (file:line) or explicitly marked n/a with the reason.
• Every debt item carries a trigger; no current-unit debt was mislabeled.
• The fixed-format block above is returned — nothing more, nothing less — and no code was changed.