Most Technical Debt Isn't Technical Debt

I posted something on LinkedIn this week that started a fight. "Technical debt. Most of the time, you mean it's not your code." People agreed. People pushed back. A few got genuinely angry. And the thread revealed something I've been thinking about for years but hadn't fully articulated. The term "technical debt" has been inflated beyond recognition. It used to mean something precise. Now it means whatever an engineer wants it to mean when they want permission to rewrite something. The Original Definition Was Precise Ward Cunningham coined the term in 1992. He was describing a specific tradeoff ... shipping code you know is imperfect because the business needs speed now, with the understanding that you'll pay down the shortcut later. A conscious decision with a known future cost. Like a loan. You take it on deliberately. You know the interest rate. You plan to pay it back. That definition is useful. It maps cleanly to business language. Leadership can understand a deliberate tradeoff b