I agree completely, it's a powerful concept, just too narrowly applied. The 'technical' part points out that it's a special kind of debt, one that isn't measur

I agree completely, it's a powerful concept, just too narrowly applied. The 'technical' part points out that it's a special kind of debt, one that isn't measured directly in money. What's the debt? The debt is time. You can't move some technical (which isn't a noun), or some money (which is), from one account to another, to pay down a time debt. You have to pay it off with skilled labor, which takes time in a way that isn't fungible with money: there's a lot of COBOL out there which can be lightly modified, or replaced, but that company can't find the hours of skilled labor to do more with it, at any price. A codebase isn't the only time debt a company can incur, any process can be stuck in a suboptimal frame because no one wants to sign off on the time it would take to make it right.