Simon Willison’s Weblog

Building technology in startups is all about having the right level of tech debt. If you have none, you’re probably going too slow and not prioritizing product-market fit and the important business stuff. If you get too much, everything grinds to a halt. Plus, tech debt is a “know it when you see it” kind of thing, and I know that my definition of “a bunch of tech debt” is, to other people, “very little tech debt.”

— Tom MacWright

# 3rd November 2024, 4:36 pm / technical-debt, tom-macwright

Every wave of technological innovation has been unleashed by something costly becoming cheap enough to waste. Software production has been too complex and expensive for too long, which has caused us to underproduce software for decades, resulting in immense, society-wide technical debt. This technical debt is about to contract in a dramatic, economy-wide fashion as the cost and complexity of software production collapses, releasing a wave of innovation.

— Paul Kedrosky and Eric Norlin

# 27th March 2023, 5:14 pm / software-development, ai, generative-ai, llms, technical-debt

Migrations are both essential and frustratingly frequent as your codebase ages and your business grows: most tools and processes only support about one order of magnitude of growth before becoming ineffective, so rapid growth makes them a way of life. [...] As a result you switch tools a lot, and your ability to migrate to new software can easily become the defining constraint for your overall velocity. [...] Migrations matter because they are usually the only available avenue to make meaningful progress on technical debt.

— Will Larson

# 23rd April 2018, 3:03 pm / migrations, software-engineering, will-larson, technical-debt