#technical-debt — Public Fediverse posts

Many years agon, when I worked as a full-time software developer ("engineer"?), #TechnicalDebt was a much debated topic.

The awareness of having cut corners, of having applied quick-and-dirty fixes, and of everything piling up, and accumulating, was still there. You knew where your sloppy work resided, and that you "should" straighten things up, and how you might do it (if you only got permission, and a time slot to do it, that is).

Now we have "coders", and on top of the technical debt hidden in the code, there is a new #CognitiveDebt, the absence of conceptual understanding from their brains.

• You never understood how the "AI"-generated code actually works (or seems to work), because most lines of it never passed your gray cells, while you kept boasting of being more "productive" (when was LOC ever a positive measure, by the way?).

• You're aware that you "should" understand most of how the code works, though, because as sure as hell, bug reports will come in

• When they come in, on top of, and before your debugging work, you're now facing the task of understanding how the slop was "intended" to work. But why invest that time?

• The "fix" won't pass your gray cells either. You just write another test to reproduce the error, and prompt for as long as it takes to get the lights back to green. (Oh, you still write tests yourself, don't you?)

And if you fool yourself into thinking that an "AI" merely "assisted" you with a code snippet, or two: take a look at yourself and your effective (!) skills, after several months of having been "assisted". At your resulting habits, too. At your feeling of professional integrity.

" #AI " #SoftwareDevelopment

"However, AI systems allow attackers to cash in on tech debt, and they don't need access to frontier models to do it. Free, open-weight models also excel at finding bugs in software and configurations, chaining these together, and abusing them to break software and systems."
https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/08/14/autonomous-ai-attacks-pose-clear-and-present-danger-to-critical-infrastructure/5287594
#cybersecurity #criticalinfrastructure #PLCs #technicaldebt

What's the longest you've ever seen a "temporary" IT solution survive in production?

Bonus points if:

* its creator left years ago
* nobody knows how it works
* everyone is afraid to switch it off
* it eventually got its own monitoring

We'll refrain from mentioning the Raspberry Pi supporting hundreds of field engineers.

For now.

#IT #Technology #SysAdmin #TechnicalDebt

ARGH!!!

Diese vermaledeiten SC/SC Patchfelder machen mich noch kirre!

Ratet mal, welche Kabel ich nicht mehr in ausreichender Laenge habe.

Tausche gerne gegen ST/ST auf SC/SC. Brauche SC/SC auf LC/LC, 7m.

Hmpf...

#network #sysadmin #networkadmin #technicaldebt #oeffentlicherDienst

Most of Your Tech Debt Is Free, by (not on Mastodon or Bluesky):

https://piechowski.io/post/most-of-your-tech-debt-is-free/?ref=frontenddogma.com

#technicaldebt #maintenance #prioritization #economics

““The biggest challenge is documentation being out of sync with the API that’s available,” says Sundaresan. “Docs being out of sync is actually a worse problem today since we release much faster.”

While working at Microsoft, he found some Azure command-line interfaces (CLIs) had more than 1,500 commands. CLIs and APIs change with new versions, and new parameters are often added without updating the corresponding documentation. To his point, a 2024 APIContext study found that 75% of production APIs don’t match their specification files. This mismatch can break integrations and applications.

Knowledge decay also creates substantial rework. “The challenge is everywhere,” says Sundaresan.

“Back when I worked at eBay, engineers would get moved around all the time,” he says. Much of the work relied on consultants, who would move on to the next job once a project was complete. This led to substantial duplication, as later developers would struggle to understand the original code and decide to redo it or change large portions of it.

He estimates that only 15% to 20% of code is newly written, while 60% to 65% involves modernization, migration, and maintenance. Whether it’s out of sync documentation or opaque code bases, that one missing link can result in significant wasted effort. “You can get 99% right, but then the 1% that you get wrong can appear as a huge time sink.””

https://leaddev.com/ai/how-to-avoid-knowledge-decay-in-software-engineering

#TechnicalDebt #SoftwareEngineering #Documentation #TechnicalWriting #SoftwareDevelopment #AI #LLMs

@nobsagile oh dear 😂 der letzte Refactoring-Sprint, den ich einmal als PM/PO drei Monate im Voraus vereinbart hatte, wurde abgesagt: Am Rande eines 1+1 richtete mir die dienstjüngste Agenturentwicklerin aus, dass die Agentur ja in KW x und y Sommerurlaub macht. Laut Tailwind-Bundle ist die Webanwendung, um die es ging, just dieser Tage exakt drei Jahre auf dem technischen Stand von vorm Sommerurlaub 🤭

#Refactoring #enshittification #technicaldebt

I'm manually editing a Python file on a deployed host to fix a known problem in the library that was installed via pip.

It's fixed the problem, telemetry is reporting in. But I feel unclean.

#python #raspberrypi #linux #technicaldebt

Struggling with tech debt?
Quick fix: name it, place it, decide it:

1️⃣ Reckless + Deliberate = landmine
2️⃣ Reckless + Inadvertent = skills gap
3️⃣ Prudent + Deliberate = calculated bet
4️⃣ Prudent + Inadvertent = learning

Fix landmines first, log the rest!

https://martinfowler.com/bliki/TechnicalDebtQuadrant.html

#TechnicalDebt #SoftwareEngineering #SoftwareAntifragility

IT Cost Reduction Often Destroys Long-Term Value.

https://technologytrends60.wordpress.com/2026/07/15/it-cost-reduction-often-destroys-long-term-value/

🔗 Rewriting Bun in Rust
https://bun.com/blog/bun-in-rust
#memory #rust #ai #technicaldebt #migration

Overbuilding Before Core Value is Proven is a common mistake software companies make. This way the company can achieve better positioning and avoids technical debt to a point.

More mistakes:

https://www.softwareantifragility.com/p/skeletons-as-a-service-part-1-startups

#SaaS #SoftwareResilience #TechnicalDebt

AI - especially agentic AI - is inadvertently creating more technical debt. But there are a few steps one can take to help mitigate the situation.

https://www.markloveless.net/blog/2026/7/2/ai-and-technical-debt

#ai #technicaldebt #infosec #security

LLM (noun): a machine used by software teams to turn piles of cash into technical debt

#LLM #AI #software #TechDebt #TechnicalDebt #coding #AmbroseBierce

Mainframes have been declared dead for decades.

Oddly enough... nobody seems to have told the banks, the airlines, the governments or the companies still processing millions of transactions every single night.

https://ithorrorstories.eu/#rant01

#mainframe #it #legacyit #technicaldebt #technology

🐪🔤 In a riveting tale of font frustration, our brave protagonist faces the Herculean task of rendering Arabic text, only to discover it’s like trying to teach a camel to tap dance. The page ends up looking like a Picasso painting and we're left wondering if the real technical debt isn't just a Ponzi scheme of misplaced pixels and misplaced priorities. 🤦‍♂️✨
https://lr0.org/blog/p/arabic/ #fontfrustration #cameltoetapdance #Arabictext #technicaldebt #misplacedpixels #HackerNews #ngated

Introduction to the experience of rendering Arabic typography&its technical debt

https://lr0.org/blog/p/arabic/

#HackerNews #ArabicTypography #TypographyDesign #TechnicalDebt #WebDesign #DigitalArt

After a decade modernizing government systems, I learned that technical debt is often policy, knowledge, and organizational debt—not bad code. https://hackernoon.com/what-a-decade-in-government-software-taught-me-about-technical-debt #technicaldebt

Configuration flags are where software goes to rot (00f.net)

https://00f.net/2026/04/11/config-flags/

#programming #technicaldebt #softwareengineering #coding

Prompts Are Technical Debt Too, by @seangoedecke.bsky.social:

https://www.seangoedecke.com/prompts-are-technical-debt-too/?ref=frontenddogma.com

#prompting #ai #technicaldebt

Looks like the Technical Debt Collection Service is about to impact FLOSS and other projects and organisations that aren't really prepared 😟

https://twit.tv/shows/security-now/episodes/1080?autostart=false

#TechnicalDebt #ClaudMythos #InfoSec

There is no phased migration plan to eliminate technical debt. You do it all in one year, or you're not serious about it.
#technical_debt #technicaldebt #technicalDebtManagement