Wasting our time - Thoughts about technical debt
August 18, 2025
I think it was Ward Cunningham who described how a system grows in complexity as it grows in capability. As systems grow, they inevitably create cruft, so there is no way to keep an evolving system “clean.” Since our understanding of a system evolves with its design, our definition of “clean” changes as the system improves or when another piece is introduced.
