A client’s team spent a full week adding a CSV export to their admin panel. Two engineers, clear requirements, maybe a day of actual work. The rest of the time went to understanding existing code well enough to change it safely. That’s what I call codebase drag: when the codebase makes every task take longer than it should. It doesn’t show up in any dashboard or sprint report.

  • Ethan
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    16 hours ago

    Anything that makes the codebase harder to maintain than it should be is technical debt.

      • Ethan
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        8 hours ago

        “How easy is it to onboard?” is functionally equivalent to “How easy is it to understand?”. The biggest factor in maintainability almost always boils down to how easy it is to understand. So, difficult to onboard almost certainly means difficult to maintain, and thus is tech debt.