this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2026
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Whilst true, I was not talking about maintenance...
Rather "getting started in" ie onboarding.
“How easy is it to onboard?” is functionally equivalent to “How easy is it to understand?”. The biggest factor in maintainability almost always boils down to how easy it is to understand. So, difficult to onboard almost certainly means difficult to maintain, and thus is tech debt.
I see that as too idealist. When the rubber hits the road you cant spoon feed every newcomer with 100x docs per 1x code, so it's inevitably going to be difficult for some to approach.
So now cos it's hard for somebody you assume there is debt?... It can't be infinitely easy.
If your project is easy to maintain (aka low tech debt) that means it should be easy to understand the overall structure and it should be easy to understand any given component. So a new dev should be able to quickly figure out what part they need to change and how to change that part.
Some large, complex systems (like an OS) are unavoidably complex. Maybe it’s not fair to call that tech debt, but it’s still functionally the same thing - stuff that slows down development velocity due to difficulty of understanding. It’s just (probably) unavoidable given the domain.
But the majority of software projects aren’t that complex. The majority of software is apps and libraries that aren’t terribly complex. Monsters like operating systems and million to billion user scale products are outliers.
So did we make it to "codebase drag" yet?
Something that isn't debt but is a headwind to making changes.