← Glossary
Technical Debt
The accumulated cost of shortcuts taken during a build that make future changes slower or riskier.
Technical debt isn't inherently bad — sometimes a shortcut is the right call to ship faster — but undocumented, unowned, or unstructured shortcuts compound over time into a system that's expensive and risky to change. It's the underlying condition behind most of the failure patterns on this site.
Related terms
Where this shows up in practice
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