[chipsy]

What we're looking for in design is simpler. Simpler becomes conceptually harder very quickly, because it means challenging a lot of assumptions and opening up some unknowns.

The tried-and-true implementation has a known initial cost and cost scaling factor as it's repeated throughout an application, while an experimental (and overdesigned) one is extremely sensitive to context and could become a net negative if it fails.

When we talk about "technical debt," I think we're describing something that isn't an experimental design, it's just "below" the known standard - it's faster to implement, but it cannot scale, and we already know that. Conversely, a standard practice is one that works and doesn't usually get pushed to its tolerance limits.

The corollary of this is that for any engineering project taking on a big enough problem, you have to assume some technical debt to ground the system in a place where each module can be tested as part of a whole: otherwise your work will go too deep into the experimental/overdesigned zone before it ever completely functions.