Using the Technical Debt Manager Template to Audit Your Codebase in Claude Code

If you use Claude Code, there is a ready-made template that runs a comprehensive audit of your codebase. It analyzes code health, maintainability, and produces a strategic refactoring plan. The tool is called the Technical Debt Manager, and it lives on the Claude Code Templates site.

How to Set It Up

Navigate to the Claude Code Templates site and find the Technical Debt Manager component. You have two options for installation:

1. Basic installation using npx, which lets you re-run the audit on multiple codebases:

npx claude-code-templates@latest --agent-development-tools/technical-debt-manager --yes

2. Copy the markdown file directly and feed it to your AI agent as a prompt.

The template is tagged as an "agent" and "development-tools" component. It describes itself as an expert technical debt analyst for code health, maintainability, and strategic refactoring planning. It activates proactively when the codebase shows complexity growth, when planning sprints, or when prioritizing engineering work.

What the Audit Covers

The audit template is thorough. Here is the full list of what it checks:

• Scan your whole project to see how big it is, what languages it uses, and where most changes happen
• Look for messy or risky code (too complex, duplicated, hard to read, badly structured)
• Check how good your tests are (missing tests, low coverage, flaky tests, slow test runs)
• Review your dependencies (outdated packages, security issues, unused libraries)
• Find missing or outdated documentation
• Spot bad architecture and design patterns (tight coupling, "god" files, circular dependencies)
• Look for performance problems (slow queries, memory leaks, blocking code)
• Measure how "dangerous" each problem is based on bugs, changes, complexity, and testing
• Rank issues by priority (fix now, next sprint, later, or backlog)
• Turn problems into clear tasks you can put straight into Jira, GitHub, or Linear
• Create a cleanup plan showing what to fix week-by-week or quarter-by-quarter
• Generate reports showing where your tech debt is and how bad it is
• Track progress over time so you can see if things are improving
• Help managers understand impact (how debt affects speed, bugs, and money)
• Prevent future mess by suggesting rules for reviews, CI, and testing

Key Takeaways

• The Technical Debt Manager template gives Claude Code a structured framework for auditing any codebase
• Installation is a single npx command, or you can copy the markdown and paste it into any AI agent
• The audit covers everything from code complexity and test coverage to dependency health and architecture patterns, then outputs prioritized action items

Resources

• Claude Code Templates -- Technical Debt Manager component page