context debt /ˈkɒn.tekst det/ · n. — the expired code your AI reads, and you pay for, every day
Workarounds for bugs fixed upstream years ago. Polyfills for browsers you dropped. Retries tuned for defaults that no longer exist. The reason died — the code stayed. Now your agents read it on every task, learn from it, and bill you for it.
The next one will be found by the watcher, not by hand — those 1,813 repositories are being re-checked as the issues their workarounds cite get closed. No spam, ever.
npx contextdebt
Receipts
Every diagnosis comes with an evidence chain: the commit that created it, the upstream cause, and the proof that the cause is dead.
How it works
Markers, cited issues, dates — your codebase already confesses which lines exist because of somebody else's bug. A comment is testimony: people can write anything, or nothing. So a lead opens a case. It never closes one. What a returnable note looks like →
Your lockfile. The shipped artifact. The vendor's own end-of-life record. Even a closed issue is only testimony — someone clicked a button — so the case advances on evidence matched against the versions you actually run, and nothing else.
A diagnosis needs independent evidence agreeing and a human reading the code in place. It ships with its receipts: origin commit, upstream cause, proof the cause is dead, your own tests passing without it. Code that survived fifteen years can wait a week for that.