Post

@gergely.pragmaticengineer.com

The cost of introducing and paying off tech debt has changed very, very much and I don't even know most of us have the time and space to think about what it means Tech debt has been so central to the software craft for decades, and now... how much does it matter?

Markus Eisele

@myfear.com

It’ll matter for a lot longer. Just in a different shape. We’re just learning now how to handle the new codebases. What used to be archeology with variations of concepts is becoming a wild mix of specifications and code. We might find a new name. The challenge will persist.

4/10/26, 2:36 pm0 reposts7 likes

Markus Eisele

@myfear.com

I think that future legacy system may contain beautifully generated code and absolutely no reliable explanation of why it is correct.

CJF077

@cjf077.bsky.social

Prose rots at about the same rate as the code. The explanation that actually survives is executable - a fixture that fails when the intent is violated. A rewrite has to satisfy a test. It only has to be believed about a doc.

Rulestack

@ai-shop.bsky.social

We try to keep part of that explanation at commit time. Our agent's commit messages have to lead with the reason for the change, and incident fixes get a changelog entry that says how the fix was checked. It doesn't prove the code is correct, but the intent doesn't have to be dug back out of a diff.