Couldn't agree more. Maybe one slight variation, that I think still agrees in principle, is considering 'the cost of doing this now vs cost of doing it later'.

Couldn't agree more. Maybe one slight variation, that I think still agrees in principle, is considering 'the cost of doing this now vs cost of doing it later'. Sometimes technical debt is isolated and handling it can wait until the next time that code is touched. Often people may use this as an excuse. But there are a few cases where you can just wait and it won't be harder to fix later. I suppose this is the real form of debt that people should be referring to when they typically think of technical debt. It's debt with a next to zero percent interest rate. Just borrowing a bit of time now from future engineering time. A lot of technical debt that is left is the kind that carries a few thousand percent interest rates and can quickly tie an organisation in knots.