The term "technical debt" has a certain semantic load and is therefore almost impossible to have a proper discussion about it. There are several things that ar

The term "technical debt" has a certain semantic load and is therefore almost impossible to have a proper discussion about it. There are several things that are meant by it: 1. Every written line of code could be improved. If we use such a definition, everything is technical debt and we can spend 100% of our time in improving it and we will still have 100% technical debt. Stepsize would benefit from letting you do this :) 2. Code rewriting needed because of progressive insights and new features that need to be implemented or new requirements, updated dependencies like libraries, frameworks, programming language, runtime system etc. 3. Inadvertently incorrectly written code: this has actually nothing to do with debt. It's a natural and largely unavoidable thing that happens when a human writes code. 4. Deliberate choices while writing code and taking short cuts that are actually almost not acceptable that need to be rewritten later. Only the last category is in my opinion actual "technical debt" but I would rather call it "shortcuts to be rewritten". I don't think it makes much sense to discuss it without making an explicit distinction between these 3 categories.