Technical Debt

Ward Cunningham coined the term in 1992. Quick solutions that aren’t quite right are like taking on debt — you get something now but pay interest later through slower development, more bugs, harder changes.

The metaphor is useful fiction. Code doesn’t actually compound like money. There’s no 18% APR on a messy module. But the metaphor gives engineers and product managers shared vocabulary: “We’re paying interest on that auth system” communicates the tradeoff without a 20-minute explanation of coupling and cohesion.

Some “debt” is strategic — shipping faster matters more than perfect code. Some is accidental — you didn’t know better. Some is bit rot — the world changed and your solution didn’t.

The metaphor breaks down if taken literally. But it produces useful conversations about when to fix things and when to accept the cost.

Related: [[useful-fictions]]