What is Technical Debt?
The accumulated cost of shortcuts, quick fixes, and deferred quality improvements in your codebase. Like financial debt, it accrues interest — making future changes increasingly expensive.
In plain English
Building a house without blueprints. The first few rooms go up fast, but each addition is harder because nothing was planned. Eventually, adding a bathroom requires tearing down a wall, rerouting plumbing, and reinforcing a foundation that wasn't designed for the load.
How AI tools create technical debt
AI coding tools optimize for shipping speed, not long-term maintainability. They generate duplicated logic instead of shared utilities, hardcode values that should be configurable, skip error handling, omit tests, and create 'god components' that do everything in one file. Each of these is a form of technical debt.
When it becomes a problem
A small amount of technical debt is normal and acceptable — especially when validating an idea. It becomes a problem when: adding simple features takes weeks instead of days, bugs appear every time you make changes, you're afraid to deploy because things might break, and onboarding new developers takes months instead of weeks.
How to manage it
You don't need to eliminate all debt at once. Prioritize: fix security-related debt immediately, address high-traffic code paths next, and leave low-impact debt for when you touch that code for other reasons. Our code audit identifies and prioritizes your technical debt so you know where to invest effort.
Frequently asked questions
Is it okay to ship with technical debt?
Yes — if it's intentional. Shipping a prototype to validate an idea is a smart trade-off. The problem is unintentional debt from AI tools that you didn't choose to take on. Know what debt you have and have a plan to address the critical parts.
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