Bankruptcy is more correctly letting you get away from obligations to creditors with lesser terms to the creditors than originally agreed because you can no lon

Bankruptcy is more correctly letting you get away from obligations to creditors with lesser terms to the creditors than originally agreed because you can no longer pay it back. I think there’s nothing very close to this for technical debt because even in a rewrite there’s new debt involved. A rewrite is a lot closer to refinancing where the value of the asset is re-evaluated and new terms of debt repayment are structured that stakeholders agree to. Most people seem familiar with chapter 7 bankruptcies but there’s 11 and 13 too. Furthermore, bankruptcy is about handling an original amount lended - rewrites oftentimes are done with lessons learned from the original version (rewriting from Python to Go isn’t bankruptcy). Technical debt bankruptcy is probably closer to shutting down a service / product with no replacement - the effort has already been spent and you’re walking away from costs without caring for the creditors (customers and engineers alike). The question of whether technical debt can be zeroed in a technical bankruptcy is who the creditors of technical debt really are - is it the business as a whole or the engineers that maintain this stuff? To me, the state of technical debt bankruptcy is a business in a zombie state unable to grow to service the debts because of the technical debts keeping them uncompetitive rather than something more fundamentally wrong with the business like product market fit or bad reputation.