Technical debt refers to the hidden cost of choosing a quicker, often suboptimal solution now—at the expense of long-term maintainability. Just like financial debt, it can grow over time and slow down progress.

Types of technical debt:

• Deliberate: “We’ll fix this later” decisions made to meet deadlines.
• Accidental: Result of poor design, inexperience, or lack of refactoring.
• Bit rot: Code becomes outdated or incompatible over time.

Symptoms:

• Features take longer to implement.
• Bugs are frequent in specific parts of the code.
• New developers struggle to onboard or understand existing logic.

Common causes:

• Tight deadlines.
• Poor documentation and lack of tests.
• Ignoring refactoring or code reviews.

How to manage technical debt:

1. Identify and track it using issue labels or comments (e.g., // TODO: refactor).
2. Include it in planning—allocate 10–20% of each sprint for refactoring or improvements.
3. Prioritize based on impact—fix code that blocks new features first.
4. Avoid accumulating more debt—invest in design, architecture, and team skill-building.

Technical debt isn’t always bad—it can help ship MVPs faster. But unmanaged debt can cripple agility and morale. Balance speed with code quality for long-term success.