[stronglikedan]

> when the business requires more coding and technical debt comes

Tech debt doesn't come because the business requires more coding. It comes from poor planning and rushed implementation, often spurred by overzealous and naive management.

This is a small team with one dev, so they likely do things correctly from the start and don't acquire much if any technical debt. Nothing has to be done yesterday, ever.

[vergessenmir]

Tech debt is a function of your code base, it's age, team turnover and number of pivots. Many factors to consider but I'll focus on pivots.

You can't plan for a pivot because it's a known unknown. The same way you can't plan for a specific financial event in the market but you can brace yourself for a category of scenarios. Even with that, you can't predict the impact or the appropriate response your business needs to take.

In the same way so is the pivot. The nature of the pivot is the market revealing the debt you didn't know you had. The magnitude of that readjustment to the market, in the time it has to happen and the time to the next pivot is unknowable because it's information not present at design time.

[hoppp]

Exactly. Technical debt often comes when a lot of developers work on the same codebase. Everyone contributed and nobody refactors.

If the project is well thought out in advance a single developer is enough and will do perfect code