You're right to be worried about having more developers adding technical debt. If they're doing that slower than you're clearing it up then you'll eventually fi

You're right to be worried about having more developers adding technical debt. If they're doing that slower than you're clearing it up then you'll eventually finish your task. However, if they're doing that at a faster rate than you're clearing it up then you'll never get there. Starting over from scratch always sounds tempting, but in my experience it's only effective if the underlying architecture won't support what you need the system to do. Usually it's better to work with the existing codebase and slowly clean it up (check out Working Effectively With Legacy Code by Michael Feather for some great advice on ways to tackle it). The best way to deal with this is to get the other developers involved in cleaning up the codebase. If they tidy up the area they're adding new code to then it'll soon get cleaned up in the most important areas (the ones that are having to be changed regularly).