All code is technical debt

I think the author is basically diluting the term "technical debt" to the point it becomes meaningless. Much of what they are talking about is the inherent difficulty of managing complexity, mixed with the difficulty of understanding requirements/defining features well.

I think "technical debt" as a term is overused and sometimes misapplied, but the core idea resonates with many developers, at least the way it is most often used - which isn't exactly the original proposal as another commentpoints out. The key part of it is the analogy with an interest rate. I can decide do put 5k on the credit card for a last minute holiday, but for as long as I don't pay that off, I'm paying 20-something percent, every month, forever. Similarly for example a rush to add features to hit a demo deadline can introduce brittleness and abstraction failures into your codebase that you pay for every time you make changes, add features, do nearly anything. The analogy is that some of your development is going to be wasted "servicing the debt" going forward until you fix that (pay off the debt). That doesn't mean its the wrong move, for the same reasons that taking on debt can be the right move for a person or business.

That's the thing. Not making the problem worse is fine and all, but most projects simply aren't removing enough. It's amazing that today's software functions as well as it does, and programmers today are lucky they can hitch a free ride on decent hardware.

I had no idea Cunningham was so thoughtful about it. It's a term used by less thoughtful people in most of my experience.

All wealth (negentropy/complexity) creation creates debt.

Whenever we build, we use intelligence to rearrange things in more complex ways that don't naturally occur. Ideally, this creates value by unlocking things we want that we previously couldn't have.

But this work always creates a burden on the future (debt) to maintain the complexity we built. This is especially true if the complexity doesn't gracefully degrade back to a more primitive state and the choices of people coming after you are "maintain" or "collapse and regress back further than your predecessor started, because you've forgotten the old ways".

If you don't want to place this burden on the future, then the only surefire solution is to not build anything. Just be happy with maintaining what you have and hope that the environment doesn't change around you so much that what you have isn't good enough.

But I don't think this is what we want. We need to build a LOT more for some of the existential goals we have as a civilization.

Just know that every act of creation that sticks around intrinsically creates a burden on the future to maintain it.

Acknowledge and respect that, but keep building.