Technical Debt

Technical debt is the extra cost of maintainability that accumulates when shortcuts are taken to speed up development in the short term — it has to be 'repaid' with extra time and effort later.

Common sources include missing tests, rushed architecture decisions, and incomplete documentation — especially likely in projects delivered by a single freelancer. A common misconception is that technical debt is just 'messy code' — in reality it directly slows down future feature development and adds risk when scaling the system or handing it off to a new team.