# What technical debt is and why it destroys projects that seemed solid Source: https://baqueiro.es/en/ingenieria-sin-atajos/what-is-technical-debt-destroys-projects/ Published: 2025-06-18T08:07:00+00:00 Updated: 2025-06-18T08:07:00+00:00 Author: Baqueiro Desarrollo Web Language: en-US Usage: Attribution required: quoting allowed with a visible link back --- **TL;DR** - Technical debt is the shortcuts you take today and pay for later, with interest. - It doesn’t show up on any balance sheet: it grows quietly until the system starts to creak. - It builds up through tight deadlines, missing documentation, developer turnover and too many plugins. - It’s hard to see from the outside; the most reliable way to catch it in time is an independent technical review. There’s a metaphor in software development that describes, with real precision, something that happens in almost every web project: technical debt. Programmer Ward Cunningham coined it in the early 90s, and it’s still the best way to explain this problem to people who don’t write code. The idea is simple. You take a shortcut: a quick fix that works now but isn’t the best way to solve the problem. At that moment, you take on debt. Just like financial debt, that decision has a deferred cost. You don’t pay it today. You pay it later, with interest. The problem is that technical debt doesn’t show up on any balance sheet. It doesn’t trigger alerts or have a visible due date. It grows on its own, quietly, until the system starts to creak and nobody understands why. ## How it builds up without anyone deciding it Technical debt is rarely the result of a conscious decision to do things badly. It almost always builds up for reasons that seemed sensible at the time. The deadline is tight and you have to deliver. You pick the solution that works now, intending to improve it later. That later never comes, because the next project is already waiting. The developer who built part of the system is gone, and left nothing in writing. The new one doesn’t understand the decisions that were made, so they build on top without touching what’s there. Changing it means a risk and a time cost that aren’t in the budget. Someone installs a plugin to fix something quickly. It works. Then 5 more get installed. Each one adds its own layer of logic, its own updates and its own potential conflicts, and almost nobody [reviews a plugin before installing it](https://baqueiro.es/en/ingenieria-sin-atajos/how-to-audit-wordpress-plugin/). The system grows more complex without anyone having planned it. None of these decisions is a disaster on its own. The disaster comes when they pile up for months or years without anyone cleaning up. ## The 3 ways technical debt destroys a project Technical debt doesn’t destroy projects all at once. It wears them down. At first it’s annoying. Over time, it becomes a blocker. **First, it slows development down.** The more debt a project carries, the longer any change takes. What should be a 2-hour tweak turns into a 2-day investigation. Nobody fully understands how the system is built, and every decision can have unexpected consequences. Budgets balloon, deadlines slip and the client gets frustrated without understanding why something simple takes so long. **Then, it multiplies bugs.** In a system with a lot of technical debt, bugs have a peculiar trait: fixing one creates another. The code is so tangled that it’s hard to touch anything without it rippling somewhere else. Production errors become more frequent, and updates go from routine improvements to risky operations. **Finally, it blocks growth.** There comes a point where adding new features on top of a debt-heavy foundation costs more than rebuilding everything from scratch. The project that started well becomes a trap: too expensive to maintain, too risky to change and too tangled to hand over to another developer without weeks of analysis. That’s the moment the client discovers that the investment they made 3 years ago can no longer be improved step by step. They have to start over. And that conversation is always hard. ## Why it’s so hard to spot from the outside If technical debt were visible, it would be easy to manage. The problem is that, from the outside, a project with a lot of debt can look perfectly healthy. The website works. Pages load. Forms submit. The client updates content without any trouble. Everything looks fine. What you can’t see from the admin panel is the quality of the code holding all of that up. Whether it’s structured to grow smoothly or it’s a house of cards that stands only as long as nobody touches it. Whether the installed plugins are the bare minimum or a pile of partial fixes interacting in ways nobody controls. Even so, there are signs anyone can notice without reading a single line of code: - Every small change takes longer and costs more than the last one. - Updates keep getting postponed “in case they break something”. - Only one person dares to touch certain parts of the system. - The same bugs come back after every fix. - Nobody can explain what half of the installed plugins are for. If you recognize 2 or 3 of these signs, there’s probably debt piling up. To find out how much and where, the most reliable option is a technical review by someone with enough judgment to assess not only whether the system works, but how it’s built and what it takes to maintain it and help it grow. ## The difference between unavoidable and avoidable technical debt Not all technical debt is the same, and understanding the difference changes how you manage it. **There’s unavoidable technical debt.** Every project makes decisions with incomplete information. What looks like the best solution today may not be in 2 years, once the business has changed, new tools have appeared or the data volume is 10 times larger. That debt is the normal cost of building software in real-world conditions. You manage it with periodic reviews that modernize the system in a controlled way. **And there’s avoidable technical debt.** The kind that comes from not asking the right questions at the start. From choosing the fastest solution without thinking about the long-term cost. From working with vendors who optimize for shipping fast rather than for what comes next, which is exactly what [the real cost of a cheap website](https://baqueiro.es/en/ingenieria-sin-atajos/real-cost-of-a-cheap-website/) is about. That debt isn’t unavoidable. It’s a choice, even if not always a conscious one. The difference matters because it determines what you can do about it. Unavoidable debt gets managed. Avoidable debt gets prevented, and that takes someone on the project asking the hard questions from day one. ## What sets apart a developer who thinks long term A developer who works with the long term in mind makes different decisions from one who only optimizes for shipping fast. They don’t install a plugin when they can write 50 lines of code that solve exactly the problem without adding dependencies. They don’t copy a solution from a tutorial without understanding what it means in the specific context of the project. And they don’t deliver without documenting, because they know whoever comes next (or they themselves in 6 months) will need to understand what was built and why. That’s what [documenting technical decisions](https://baqueiro.es/en/ingenieria-sin-atajos/how-to-document-technical-decisions/) is for, not just the code. Those decisions take more time in the short term and are sometimes hard to justify on a tight budget. But they’re exactly the ones that determine whether a project is still maintainable and scalable 3 years from now or turns into a ticking time bomb. Technical debt isn’t a technical problem. It’s a judgment problem. And judgment [can’t be bought by the hour](https://baqueiro.es/en/la-sala-de-maquinas/technical-partner-vs-hourly-vendor/): you recognize it in how someone makes decisions when nobody’s watching. At Baqueiro, we build with the next release in mind, not just today’s deadline. If your project shows signs of accumulated technical debt (development getting slower, frequent bugs, budgets spiraling), [tell us what’s going on](https://baqueiro.es/en/contact/): we’ll review it and tell you plainly what we see.