I would say no, not really. If you build something and then never need to touch it again, well then it must be working perfectly and so there's no debt to pay o

I would say no, not really. If you build something and then never need to touch it again, well then it must be working perfectly and so there's no debt to pay off. However that is almost never the case. If you continuously work on the code, it will accumulate debt over time in the form of bugs, or design flaws when taking shortcuts implementing new behavior. The more people you have working in the same area, the likelier this is to occur. The long term solution like one of the posters in another thread said, is to pay down your tech debt strategically over time. Good habits for preparing to deal with it are keeping tests updated, and commenting in sections that get particularly gnarly.