I view technical debt as a meta-game. At the beginning of a project you want to take out lots of technical debt. Paper over stuff with easy choices, use other f

I view technical debt as a meta-game. At the beginning of a project you want to take out lots of technical debt. Paper over stuff with easy choices, use other frameworks, try to make something bad that barely works. A lot of times somewhere in the middle you declare technical debt bankruptcy by moving on to a new project and you never have to pay down any technical debt. Other times the product grows and scales and you have to manage paying down the technical debt. Here you can even use the cheesy financial advice you hear on the radio about paying down debt. Considering what might be most likely to compound, what debt you might be able to later write off and avoid paying it now. There is a constant push and pull of how much technical debt to take out, when to pay it down, and when to write it off.