Member-only story
We Are Building a Technical Debt Bubble
AI makes us faster at borrowing against the future.
In 2008, the financial system discovered it had been bundling and moving risk so efficiently that almost nobody could track where it had actually gone. The individual loans looked fine. The problem was in the structure; nobody was watching.
I think about that a lot when I look at how my team is shipping code now.
We are faster than we have ever been. A story that used to take three days can get done in half a day. Features that would have required careful design discussion are going out after a 20-minute session with an AI assistant. The velocity numbers look great.
And I have been adding technical debt faster than I have ever been in my career.
The Problem With Speed
Technical debt is not bad code. Bad code is bad code. Technical debt is a decision you made quickly that will cost someone more time later to understand, change, or fix. The decision might have been right. It was just made fast.
When a developer writes code manually, the writing speed roughly tracks the thinking speed. You type a function, you think about what it does, you notice the edge case, you either handle it or you consciously skip it. The decision is…
