Technical debt isn't an all or nothing thing. It can just slow you down _a bit_. But if you accumulate enough now things that should take an hour take 2 hours.

Technical debt isn't an all or nothing thing. It can just slow you down _a bit_. But if you accumulate enough now things that should take an hour take 2 hours. or 4 hours. Or 3 days! The non-refutable answer is you should spend an adequate amount of time thinking about stuff before doing them. Anecdotally I've found that people are not very good at thinking well while simultaneously coding, so thinking a bit before opening the code browser works pretty well Being able to distinguish avoidable technical debt and reasonable tradeoffs at the time can save you a hell of a lot of time. And yeah working in messy codebases suck! But more importantly it can cause people to lose time they could spend working on more features and shipping stuff