Codebase audit

An audit's value is the ranking and the evidence, not the length. A finding without a file path, query result, PR number, or row count is a hypothesis — label it as one.

Ground the audit in code and production, not in documents

Project notes, plans, and status docs are checkpoints, not authority. Start from them to learn what was claimed, then verify against reality: the live commit, database state, PR checks, branch heads.

When the documents and the code disagree, that disagreement is itself a finding — often the most valuable one in the audit.

A claim about production requires a query against production. Pair this with a verification gate skill for the mechanics.

Structure

# <Scope> Audit (YYYY-MM-DD)

## TL;DR
<The three things that matter, and what you'd do first.>

## Part 1 — What you're not seeing (blind spots, ranked)
## Part 2 — Capabilities missing (ranked, each with a rough effort estimate)
## Part 3 — Existing capabilities that need improvement (ranked)
## Part 4 — Architecture changes (ranked, plain English)
## Part 5 — If I ran the next 30 days
## Verify list (discrepancies found during the audit)

Rank everything. An unranked list of 40 findings is an unactioned list of 40 findings.

Check for dormant scaffolds before estimating

Attach a rough effort estimate to each gap and say what makes it cheap or expensive.

The single most valuable audit finding is usually this one: most of the high-value "gaps" are days of work, not weeks, because the scaffolds already exist in the repo with no callers. A feature that is already 80% built is a completely different decision from one that is not.

Grep for the thing before declaring it missing. A function with zero callers is the canonical case — the code is there, nothing invokes it, and every status document describes the feature as absent.

The verify list

Every audit ends with the discrepancies it could not resolve. Each entry names:

• what was claimed
• what was observed
• what query or check would settle it

This is the section the next session actually uses. Write it even when it is short.

The explicitly-not-worth-doing section

Name what you examined and deliberately rejected, with the reason.

Audits that only add to the backlog make the backlog useless. A finding you looked at and dismissed is worth more than one you never mention, because it stops the next audit from re-raising it.

Held items are not gaps

Anything already marked as deliberately deferred, or held for an explicit human decision, is held on purpose. Do not list it as a gap.

Re-surfacing a deliberate hold as a finding is how held decisions get executed by accident.

Output

Write the audit where the project keeps them. If it supersedes a prior audit, say which one and what changed — a folder of audits should stay readable as a sequence, not as a pile.