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How much tech debt do we actually have?

Tech debt translated into real engineering hours and dollar cost.

Business insightProductMonthly + on-demand before each planning cycle.
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Free to startNo credit card requiredUpdated Apr 2026

You'd think this needs a senior engineer's gut feel — Astra reads the repo and tells you exactly which 5 fixes pay back the fastest.

The short answer

Astra answers "how much tech debt do we actually have" by scanning your GitHub repositories for TODO/FIXME/HACK comments, Sentry for recurring errors, deploy logs for failed-then-rolled-back releases, and Linear for tickets tagged debt or refactor — then estimates engineering hours owed. She quantifies it: "~127 hours of debt across 4 repos, costing ~3.2 hrs/week in slowdown." Then she ranks the top 5 items by ROI — picking ones where the fix is small but the ongoing pain is large (a 2-hour fix saving 30 min/week beats a week-long refactor saving 1 hr/month). The output is a Lark message: total debt estimate, weekly drag in hours, top 5 fixes with effort + payback, and the items safe to ignore. You stop debating debt in the abstract and start fixing the ones that pay.

How Astra actually does it

  1. 1
    Scan repos for debt markers

    GitHub search for TODO/FIXME/HACK/XXX comments across all repos, file age, last-touched dates.

    GitHub
  2. 2
    Pull recurring errors

    Sentry top 20 errors by frequency, filtered to the same root cause occurring >5x/week — those are debt symptoms.

    Sentry
  3. 3
    Cross-reference deploy stability

    Vercel and Cloud Run deploy history for last 90 days — failed deploys, rollbacks, hotfix-after-deploy patterns indicate fragile areas.

    Vercel
  4. 4
    Estimate hours owed

    Each marker gets a rough hours estimate based on file size, complexity (LOC + cyclomatic), and whether tests exist.

  5. 5
    Rank top 5 by ROI

    Effort to fix vs ongoing weekly drag. Lark message with total estimate, weekly cost, top 5 prioritized list, plus safe-to-ignore items.

    Lark

What it looks like in chat

How much tech debt do we have?
Astra
Across your 4 repos: **~127 hours of debt**, currently costing **~3.2 hrs/week** in slowdown (failed deploys, rollback time, error firefighting). **Top 5 fixes by ROI:** 1. **Inventory write race condition** (api repo) — 3 hr fix, currently causing ~45 min/week of Sentry firefighting + 2 customer complaints/month. Net payback: 3 weeks. 2. **Hardcoded retry logic in payment webhook** — 2 hr fix, eliminates 1 weekly on-call ping. Payback: 4 weeks. 3. **Untyped checkout state** (web repo) — 6 hr to add types, prevents the bug class behind 3 of last quarter's incidents. 4. **Stale dependencies in admin repo** — 4 hr to bump 14 packages, unlocks the next Next.js minor. 5. **`UserService.findOne` 8 callers using the slow path** — 1 hr refactor, ~200ms saved per request. **Safe to defer:** 38 TODOs in the marketing site repo (low-traffic, no errors). 12 "someday" comments in the discord bot. Want me to file these as tickets and assign?
What you get back

Lark digest with total debt in hours, weekly slowdown cost, top 5 fixes ranked by payback period, and a safe-to-ignore list so you stop second-guessing.

Cadence

Monthly + on-demand before each planning cycle.

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Frequently asked questions

How does she estimate hours without knowing my codebase?

She uses file LOC, complexity, test coverage, and historical commit-time signals (how long similar refactors took your team in the past, pulled from git history). Estimates are within ~30% on first run; she calibrates as you mark fixes done.

Won't she flag every TODO as debt?

No — she only flags TODOs that correlate with active errors, recent rollbacks, or recurring on-call pings. A `TODO: cleanup` on a stable file no one has touched in 18 months gets marked safe-to-ignore.

Can she actually file the tickets?

Yes — say "file these as Linear tickets" and she creates one per fix with the estimate, the linked code location, the proposed change, and the payback metric in the description. Assigns to whoever last touched the file.

What if my team disagrees with her ranking?

Override anything: "the inventory bug is actually critical, bump it." She updates her weighting and the next audit reflects your team's judgment. Three corrections usually dial her into your style.

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