Technical Debt¶
Debt generally refers to technical debt, as whole.
Technical debt represents the extra development work that arises when code is written in a quick-and-dirty way instead of following best practices. Previous work as left issues to be fixed later and that later is now.
Technical debt is not build visibly on the spot, but is usually assessed later, when the need for a previous chore becomes a reality. It may be opposed to YAGNI: you are not going to need it.
There are many types of debts: code, maintenance, documentation, readable, visual, etc.
By extension, anything that currently slows down development is considered a debt.
See also PHP Maintenance and Tech Debt: 2025 Trends, Taming Technical Debt: A Practical Guide to Managing Deprecations in PHP and Laravel and Technical debt is not malice.
Related : You Are Not Going To Need It (YAGNI), Visual Debt, Maintenance, Readable, Documentation, Legacy
