The office espresso machine had a descaling light that had been on for eight months. Everyone saw it. Everyone assumed someone else owned it. The coffee got worse by degrees so small that no single morning justified action.
Technical debt behaves identically. No individual shortcut is worth stopping for. The degradation is always gradual enough to normalise, right up until onboarding a new engineer takes three weeks.
Debt isn't the shortcuts you took. It's the shortcuts you stopped noticing.
The fix in both cases is the same and equally unglamorous: a recurring slot, a named owner, and a definition of 'done' that includes cleanup.
The descaling light has been on for eight months. So has the flaky test.
We put twenty percent of every sprint into maintenance and made the maintenance visible in the same demo as the features. Within two quarters nobody argued about it anymore.
