"We'll fix it later" is the most expensive sentence in early-stage software. Not because the fix gets harder, though it does, but because every feature built on top of it inherits the same workaround, multiplying the eventual cleanup cost.
The metric nobody tracks
Teams track velocity. Few track the ratio of new-feature time to workaround time. We've seen teams where that ratio quietly flipped: more than half of every sprint went to routing around old decisions, months before anyone noticed why shipping felt slow.
Technical debt doesn't show up as a line item. It shows up as every estimate quietly being wrong in the same direction.
The fix isn't a rewrite. That's rarely worth it. It's a standing rule: the third time you work around the same thing, that's the signal to fix it, not defer it again.
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