Technical debt
Technical debt is the accumulated cost of shortcuts, ageing design and deferred maintenance in a codebase: work that must be done later to keep software workable. Left unmeasured it compounds, slowing every future release and raising the risk of failure, while staying invisible in status reports and delivery updates.
Debt is accelerating in the AI era. The share of new code rewritten within two weeks has more than doubled since AI, from 3.3% to 7.1%, and duplicated code blocks are up 81% (GitClear, 2026), while AI-induced defects have risen 60% even in codebases rated healthy (CodeScene, 2026).
Because it does not appear on any invoice, technical debt is easy to ignore until it comes due. Reading it from the code itself puts the liability on the table before it prices itself into a release, an outage or a deal.
How an independent audit reads technical debt →
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