In my experience, the costs are felt immediately, because there is more code and more complexity. Virtually every cost in software development goes up when the

In my experience, the costs are felt immediately, because there is more code and more complexity. Virtually every cost in software development goes up when there is more code and more complexity. There are more bugs. It takes longer to diagnose and fix bugs. It takes longer to add new functionality. Performance is less predictable, and performance problems are harder to diagnose. Onboarding new programmers is slower. Fewer members of the team can do critical work on the code. Routine library upgrades are more likely to impact the code and take longer when they do. Code is a liability, in other words. It may not be tangible, but you can think of it as weight that the team has to carry everywhere it goes.