Technical debt really applies when time-saving decisions in the past cost more time in the future. As such, you can't always be 100% sure whether you're incurr

Technical debt really applies when time-saving decisions in the past cost more time in the future. As such, you can't always be 100% sure whether you're incurring it at the time or not. You can only be sure later, once you have to pay it. But there are definitely times that you feel certain it's going to end up being technical debt. When you implement a system that doesn't scale, but you know it has to eventually scale massively, that's going to be technical debt. You could write it right now to handle that load, but it'd take a lot of time and money. Or you could write it the quick and dirty way, and get money coming in immediately and put off the scaling until it's actually necessary. You know it's coming. But you decided to incur that debt in order to make money sooner. IME, technical debt is usually about time or money, and getting something done cheaply now and worrying about the full cost later when it's more applicable. It's a tool, not a problem, so long as you're managing it and not just blindly choosing to do things the quick and dirty way all the time.