"We don't have tech debt."
Originally published on Impl — Jaroslaw Michalik's newsletter on engineering, AI, and building software that lasts.
Every team says this right up until they trace a bug to a decision nobody remembers making. Technical debt isn't limited to outdated dependencies and TODO comments — architecture debt, knowledge debt (the stuff that only lives in one person's head), and decision debt (choices nobody revisited once the context changed) are just as real and far less visible on a backlog board.