Tech debt isn’t real (but your tradeoffs are)

Tech debt isn't real.

That's not, of course, to say you don't have it. Or that it's not causing you problems. But if you’re a small company and you’re losing sleep over "scalability" or "clean architecture," you’re counting unhatched chickens when you should be counting sheep. In the age of agents, we need to stop viewing tech debt as a failure and start viewing it through the lens of our dear old friend, net present value.

NPV is a tool financial analysts use to determine if a cost today is worth the payoff later. A future benefit is always worth significantly less than the same benefit now, and the future value shrinks even faster as the background growth rate increases.

This is wholly accepted by the investment world. They live and die on the margins between growth rates. But try asking your engineer about it.

Tech teams could ignore the concept when capability growth was miniscule. The value of their time was more-or-less stable. But we live in a different world now, and we need to stop thinking like tech teams, and start thinking like investors.

What took me 10 hours to build two years ago, took me 2 hours last year, and takes me 2 minutes this year. In 2018, adding 100 hours to your delivery time might save 1000 hours fixing code in a year. In 2026, adding 100 hours to your delivery time will likely save you minutes next year.

Don't believe me? Ivan Zhao (CEO of Notion) just went on No Priors and announced they're rebuilding their entire (gen)AI system from the ground up every 6 months. They've got the best agentic tools in the productivity suite market and it's not even close. It's because they build for this market, this moment, and use their learnings to fuel the next total rewrite.

This isn't an invitation to release shoddy product. You can't vibe-code your way to good security or engaging UI, but you should make sure your product fits the needs of today. So when your 50 person company wants to delay a feature by two weeks because you think it won't work when you 10x in the next year, just remember NPV -- and that the agents are growing faster than you are.