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TDE — drift detection that survives the Charter

Every Charter has a Risks section for things that might go wrong inside its scope. But some debt is bigger than any one Charter: heritage from a previous decision, propagation across modules, debt that needs a dedicated Charter to fix. That's a TDE (Transversal Debt Entry).

Why this matters​

  • "Everything is a risk" defeats the risk list. Without a higher-order category, important transversal issues drown in per-Charter R<N> noise. TDE rescues them with explicit eligibility criteria.
  • Debt has to outlive the Charter that found it. When a Charter closes, its risk list closes with it. Heritage debt needs its own document that survives across Charters and can be prioritized against other tracked debt.
  • Scoring beats vibes. TDEs carry an impact × effort matrix and a status: identified | prioritized | resolved. The framework helps the team decide what to fix next; resolved TDEs stay in the repo as audit history.

Eligibility — four criteria​

A debt entry becomes a TDE if any of these apply:

  1. Heritage — it propagates from a prior Charter (strict pattern or implicit pattern reuse).
  2. Cross-module — it crosses code modules OR crosses Charter execution boundaries.
  3. Needs its own Charter — remediation is non-trivial enough to require a dedicated future Charter.
  4. Needs human prioritization — the team has to decide whether/when to fix it; the agent shouldn't decide unilaterally.

If none apply, it stays as a per-Charter R<N> risk. The /straymark-new TDE skill walks through this check.

How it works​

.straymark/06-evolution/technical-debt/
├── TDE-001-config-loader-coupling.md     status: prioritized
├── TDE-002-i18n-fallback-incoherence.md  status: identified
└── TDE-003-stale-validators.md           status: resolved (2026-04-30)

Each document has frontmatter (tde_id, status, impact, effort, created_at, resolved_at), a description of the debt, the criteria it meets, and — once prioritized — the planned Charter or remediation path.

straymark metrics surfaces open TDEs by impact and age. CI can fail when a high-impact TDE has been identified for more than N days without prioritization.

Learn more​