Glossary Terms
Technical debt
The long-term constraints that build up from quick fixes, slowing everything down over time.
Technical debt is what builds up when quick, short-term fixes harden into long-term constraints. It rarely breaks a system outright; it just slows everything down. Over time, each change gets harder to make and the outcome of touching anything gets less predictable, the same way a small loan compounds if you only ever pay the interest. A concrete example: a plugin patched to work around a bug in another plugin, with a comment saying temporary, remove after the update. Two years later neither plugin has been touched because nobody remembers which one depends on the workaround, and updating either one risks breaking the site in a way nobody can predict from reading the code. The fix isn't avoiding every quick fix. It's writing down what was borrowed and when it needs to be paid back, so the debt stays visible instead of disappearing into working code.
Nothing here yet.