Technical Debt

Technical debt is the accumulated cost of shortcuts taken to ship faster — code, structure or dependencies that work now but make future changes slower and riskier until addressed.

Some debt is a rational trade: shipping in three weeks with known shortcuts can be worth more than shipping in nine without them. The problem is unacknowledged debt, where nobody recorded what was deferred and the cost surfaces as "simple changes" that take a fortnight.

The usual sign is estimates growing over time for comparable work. If a change that took two days last year takes eight now, that's the interest payment.

Why it matters

It's the honest explanation for why an ageing site or app gets more expensive to maintain, and why a rebuild sometimes costs less than continuing to patch.

Related terms

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Core Web VitalsLargest Contentful Paint (LCP)Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)Time to First Byte (TTFB)SSR, SSG and ISRCDN (Content Delivery Network)Headless CMSProgressive EnhancementWeb Application

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