>the metaphor starts to fall apart if you consider good debt vs bad debt in terms of financial investments. No examples of good technical debt come to mind, oth

>the metaphor starts to fall apart if you consider good debt vs bad debt in terms of financial investments. No examples of good technical debt come to mind, other than the benefit of shipping quickly. I think that's where the metaphor works best. Good technical debt lets you ship sooner than you otherwise would have, similar to how a mortgage lets you afford a home sooner than you otherwise would have. Paying interest isn't ideal, but it may work out a lot better than renting. Likewise, code cruft isn't ideal, but shipping 6 months sooner might pay off a lot more than having a perfect code base can.