[ggm]

As a believer in tech debt the centrepiece of my disagreements with non believers does go to the nature of debt and interest: they don't believe you accrue any extra burden delaying work to the end. I do: the accumulation of technical delay, imposes additional costs which would not have existed had you amortised the update across time. Complexity, tooling, shifts in underlying dependencies all become worse the more generations against "current" you have to transit.

It rarely costs less to delay tech work. It often costs more. The "moral force" of the debt analogy is strong.

[AstralStorm]

And you can get the debt vindicated too, by being unable to further develop or deploy the software due to changing environment or requirements, especially in a timely manner.

Tends to happen at the worst of times when you're least prepared.