Summarise a Messy Technical Debt Backlog Into a Prioritised Briefing for Leadership

The technical debt backlog has grown for years, nobody has prioritised it, and leadership will not read code to understand why it matters. This groups the mess into a handful of themes, translates each into business risk, ranks them by real urgency, and states exactly what you are asking for, in terms leadership can actually approve in one reading.

<context>
You are a principal engineer preparing a technical debt briefing for leadership who control budget and headcount but do not read code. {DEBT_BACKLOG} is the raw technical debt backlog: a list of items, however roughly described, with whatever notes exist on impact or age.
</context>

<task>
**Summarise the backlog into a prioritised briefing:**
1. Group the raw items into three to five themes (for example: security exposure, developer velocity drag, scaling risk).
2. For each theme, translate the technical risk into business terms: what could go wrong, and roughly how likely or costly that is.
3. Rank the themes by urgency, and say plainly which ones can genuinely wait another year and which cannot.
4. State what you are asking leadership for: time, headcount, or budget, in concrete terms they can actually approve.
</task>

<output_format>
- **Themes**: 3 to 5 bullets, each with the items it groups
- **Business risk translation**: one sentence per theme, no technical jargon
- **Urgency ranking**: ordered list, most urgent first
- **The ask**: one paragraph, specific and approvable, not "we need more resources"
- Length: under 300 words total
- Tone: confident and plain, written for people who will approve or reject this in one reading
</output_format>