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Every shortcut is a loan: you get the time today and pay it back later with interest. This calculator shows the full mortgage on a "we'll fix it later".
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Share on XShare on LinkedInWard Cunningham coined the technical debt metaphor in 1992 to explain why shipping imperfect code is sometimes right, as long as you pay it back. The part people forget is the interest: every engineer who works around a shortcut pays a little, and the workarounds get their own workarounds.
The calculator compounds the hours saved at a monthly rate that depends on the kind of shortcut and the number of people touching the code. It reports the balance in engineer-hours and dollars, grades the codebase from AAA to default, and names the month when interest alone exceeds the team's maintenance time, which is when someone proposes a rewrite. The rates are invented; the shape of the curve is not.
Every shortcut is a loan. You get the time today and pay it back later, with interest, usually during an incident. Enter what the shortcut saved you and see the full mortgage: what you owe now, your credit rating, and the month the bank forecloses with The Big Rewrite.
Interest is paid in production incidents.
| Month | Balance | Interest that month | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 19 hours | 3 hours | Current |
| 3 | 28 hours | 5 hours | Current |
| 6 | 47 hours | 8 hours | Current |
| 12 | 140 hours | 23 hours | "It's fine" |
The numbers are a joke with a real shape: Ward Cunningham coined the debt metaphor because unpaid shortcuts do compound. Related: Estimate Reality Converter, Legacy Code Carbon Dater.