Day over day, year over year, AI is driving down the cost of writing code. Economists have a word for what happens when stuff keeps getting cheaper: deflation. And you do things differently during deflation.

Ward Cunningham coined the phrase “technical debt” in 1992. He was working on a financial application called WyCash and needed a metaphor to explain to his boss why they should spend time improving their code instead of shipping the next feature. For decades, the balance was simple: carry a little debt to move faster, but pay it down as soon as you can, or the accumulated mess will overwhelm and bankrupt you.

Now economists have this thing they call deflation. For an economy, it’s a nightmare. Prices drop day after day, creating a psychological trap where consumers stop spending. Why buy a washing machine today when it will be cheaper tomorrow?¹ The whole economy grinds to a halt.

But what is a ‘trap’ for a nation is a miracle for a codebase. Usually, deflation is bad for debtors because money becomes harder to come by. But technical debt is different: you don’t owe money, you owe work. And the cost of work is what’s deflating. The cost to pay off your debt – the literal dollars and hours required to fix the mess – is diminishing. It is cheaper to clean up your code today than it has ever been. And if you put it off? It becomes cheaper still. This leads to a striking reversal: technical debt² becomes a wise investment³.

I am not a professional developer – I’m a marginally competent dabbler at best – but I can see the price tag changing. The cost to fix a messy codebase is plummeting. A refactor that took a month last year, takes a week today, and may be a few flicks of the fingers next year.

This leads to a surprising conclusion for anyone managing a roadmap. You should be willing to take on more technical debt than you ever would have before⁴. Ship the prototype⁵⁶. Skip the elegant abstraction. You are borrowing expensive human hours today, and you will get to pay them back with cheap AI hours tomorrow.

But there is a second implication. The debt you already have – the spaghetti code that is actually slowing your team down right now – has never been cheaper to fix. Sure, you can put it off and it will get cheaper still, but you’ll suffer the friction along the way. So if it’s slowing you down? Throughout all of human history, there’s never been a better time to get rid of it.

In this new world, procrastination reduces the price of perfection. Adjust your spending accordingly.

1. Daniel Rock points out that the mechanism is usually demand falls first, then prices follow. ↩︎
2. Deepti Srivastava points out that in an increasing number of cases, you can declare code bankruptcy at very low cost. While too much technical debt used to mean a grueling rewrite of the codebase, paralyzing your business while competitors lapped you, now it might be as simple as ‘fix spec, regenerate code’. ↩︎
3. Daniel draws the analogy to “refinancing your codebase mortgage at a lower rate” ↩︎
4. Roy Bahat extends Deepti’s point to say you can ‘plan for bankruptcy’ – since the replacement cost is dropping so fast, treat the code as fully disposable. ↩︎
5. Michael Natkin points out that this only addresses one of the two issues of ‘shipping the prototype’. The other one is that sometimes the prototype is just bad. ↩︎
6. And Kurt Leafstrand points out that different types of tech debt are getting cheaper at different rates – it’s harder to pay down a badly architected data model than a badly ↩︎

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