[shadowgovt]

As of late, I've been thinking about how "debt" may not be the right metaphor.

Fiscal debt is a one-dimensional number that becomes higher or lower from some offset, but it can't change direction. There's no "complex numbers debt."

But software engineering is only one-dimensional if your problem domain is so constrained that the only roadblock to execution is time-at-keyboard, and that's rarely the case in most software (especially startups and hacking). I've too often seen that debt just "evaporates" when the company pivots or the entire system is replaced by another system or rendered completely irrelevant to continue accepting the notion that debt works as a metaphor. Even in the small, too often I've seen things flagged as, for example: "debt - we should consolidate these two pipelines on top of a smaller set of helpers" only to see the use of the pipelines diverge over time such that it turned out to be a great first step to keep them separate and duplicated.

Sometimes things to be improved / cleaned up are obvious, but cleanup assumes taking disorder and making order out of it, and that requires us to know what order even looks like.