I loved the author's point on "incidental complexity". I would point out though, that even if you CAN explain why something is complex doesn't mean it SHOULD b

I loved the author's point on "incidental complexity". I would point out though, that even if you CAN explain why something is complex doesn't mean it SHOULD be complex. When the subject of "tech debt" comes up, I always tell the teams I work on to focus on tasks that improve our speed or agility in the future. I believe that many coding tasks actually have a negative dev cost over time, as they reduce the dev costs of future work more than they cost at the current moment to implement. (Of course the problem is that they have a positive dev cost in the current sprint, so good luck convincing decision makers...)