Something in the codebase that you don't like can be because of cutting corners for business reasons. The real question is whether it is actually debt we are t

Something in the codebase that you don't like can be because of cutting corners for business reasons. The real question is whether it is actually debt we are talking about. A developers hurt sense of code aesthetics isn't technical debt, but e.g. if code uses an ugly hack it can bite you performance wise, or when something is added or changed. When code is never maintained the libraries used can expose known weaknesses to the world etc.