Technical Debt Explained for Non-Technical Founders
What technical debt is, why it matters for your AI-built app, and when to pay it down. A plain-English guide for founders.
What is technical debt?
Technical debt is the gap between how your code works now and how it should work for long-term maintainability. Like financial debt, it accumulates interest — the longer you wait, the harder and more expensive changes become. AI coding tools generate significant technical debt because they optimize for speed, not maintainability.
Good debt vs bad debt
Some technical debt is strategic. Shipping a prototype quickly to validate an idea? That's good debt — you made a conscious trade-off. Bad debt is unconscious: AI-generated code with security vulnerabilities, duplicated logic, and no tests. You didn't choose this debt — it was inherited from the tool.
Signs you have too much
Adding simple features takes much longer than expected. Fixing one bug creates two new ones. Developers (or AI tools) keep working around the same issues. Your app crashes or behaves unexpectedly with normal use. You're afraid to deploy changes because something might break.
When to address it
Before adding major features (clean foundation first). Before scaling (debt gets worse under load). Before hiring developers (clean code is easier to onboard). Before a funding round (investors may ask about code quality). When bug frequency is increasing faster than feature velocity.
How we help
Our code audit ($19) identifies the specific technical debt in your codebase and prioritizes what to fix first. Our refactoring service addresses the debt — cleaning up code, adding structure, writing tests, and making the codebase maintainable for future development.
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Our team handles refactor code for AI-built apps every day. Get a fixed quote within 24 hours.
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In-depth review of your source code for security, quality, and best practices.
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