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Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

Not necessarily. Technical debt is when you do something quick and dirty to get a feature out in the short-term knowing that it won't be maintainable, scalable, etc, but you do it anyway with the expectation that you'll fix it later. Some duplication and wrong abstractions are caused by this, but definitely not all.

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No, technical debt is a very general category that includes deliberate hacks, structural flaws, and small mistake bugs. It's anything that over time will damage the code base, duplications and wrong abstractions being very much included in that

You're welcome to your own definitions, but personally I keep bitrot, deferred maintenance, and "structural flaws" (which can be subjective and dependent on use cases and scale) out of the bucket of technical debt since it robs the metaphor of a defining aspect: intentionality. Debt is not something that happens passively as the world changes around you, it's something which you sign up for.

If you unintentionally destroy property and have to pay for it, you’re in debt.

We even have a concept of life debt.

Some debt is intentional, some incidental.

Most technical debt I’ve seen was not intentional, just a well meaning design that was created to serve a purpose that eventually outgrew it, and that’s when the interest started to pile up.

And happening passively is exactly what it does, interest rates change, your ability to make downpayments change. All part of the very well functioning metaphor in this context.

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