title: "Lesson 2: Managing Technical Debt" weight: 2 summary: "Using Deprecation and ADRs to manage legacy code."

Lesson 2: Managing Technical Debt

Every codebase has skeletons. The key is to label them.

Deprecating Components

We decided to move from Stripe to Adyen for lower fees. But we can't switch overnight.

import { * } from 'sruja.ai/stdlib'


Stripe = system "Legacy Payment Gateway" {
metadata {
  tags ["deprecated"]
}
description "Do not use for new features. Migration in progress."
}

Adyen = system "New Payment Gateway" {
metadata {
  tags ["preferred"]
}
}

Governance Policies

We can enforce this with a policy!

// EXPECTED_FAILURE: Policy rules not yet implemented - rule keyword is deferred feature
policy Migration "No New Stripe Integrations" {
    rule "BanStripe" {
        // Pseudo-code: Fail if any NEW relation points to Stripe
        check "relation.to != 'Stripe'"
    }
}

This prevents developers from accidentally adding dependencies to the system you are trying to kill.