Technical Debt Engine (TDE) is an operational engineering-quality platform. It observes engineering quality through capability-based, evidence-first analysis and produces canonical assessment and qualification evidence for repository-independent consumers.
The current public runtime is 1.1.1. Generation 2 delivery is complete; TDE
now follows a maintenance-first model for bug fixes, analyzer and dependency
updates, compatibility work, documentation, governance, and public-runtime
maintenance.
TDE intentionally remains:
- Observe-only and non-blocking
- Public: consumers use only the published runtime and public
tdeCLI - Capability-driven and evidence-first
- Repository-independent
Consumer workflows do not use required checks, merge blocking, soft-fails, suppressions, internal imports, or repository-specific policy forks.
The public runtime provides four canonical capabilities:
| Capability | Engineering evidence |
|---|---|
code_size |
Classified repository source-size evidence |
complexity |
Primary-product-language cyclomatic-complexity evidence |
coverage |
Canonical consumer CI coverage-artifact evidence |
dependency_health |
Package-manager-native outdated-dependency evidence |
Python uses Radon for complexity; JavaScript/TypeScript, Swift, C/C++, and C#
use Lizard. All five languages normalize to
complexity.cyclomatic.product.maximum and the same policy and qualification
route. See the capability support matrix.
Consumers integrate only through the public tde CLI, declared
configuration, versioned Evidence Schema, documented exit codes, and released
immutable contracts or artifacts. They must not depend on runtime internals,
private adapter APIs, repository layout, or unreleased behaviour. See
INTEGRATION_MODEL.md.
New capabilities are not roadmap-driven. An approved architectural assessment must first prove that a required engineering decision cannot be made using the existing capability model. The delivery path is architectural assessment, capability decision, implementation, qualification, public runtime, and then consumer adoption.
Routine product-quality findings remain owned by consumer repositories.