I also like your wording in terms of the codebase drifting from the team's understanding of the problem, which is a drift that is important to be continually mi

I also like your wording in terms of the codebase drifting from the team's understanding of the problem, which is a drift that is important to be continually mindful of. However, to the point of your blog post, there have definitely been others talking about when "technical debt" might be okay.[1] A big challenge is not only that people disagree on when debt is present, there really are multiple completely different definitions, and while some look a little like debt many don't behave like debt at all. [1] http://agilefocus.com/2012/07/02/technical-debt-the-good-the-bad-and-the-okay/ http://agilefocus.com/2012/07/02/technical-debt-the-good-the... (I wrote that post, but it also has lots of links to other people talking about different definitions of technical debt.)