Glossary
Definition
Technical Debt
The accumulated cost of shortcuts, quick fixes, and deferred engineering decisions that make future development slower and riskier.
Technical debt is a metaphor introduced by Ward Cunningham that compares the long-term cost of expedient software decisions to financial debt. Like financial debt, technical debt accrues interest — each shortcut makes future changes harder and more error-prone. Common sources include skipped tests, hardcoded values, duplicated logic, and missing documentation. In AI-generated codebases, technical debt often appears as inconsistent patterns, missing error handling, and tightly coupled components that resist modification.
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