Technical debt in most agile teams exists in two places: in the codebase, where it slows down every sprint without appearing in any sprint report, and in informal conversations between developers, where it is acknowledged but never prioritized. This arrangement persists because engineers are reluctant to burden the product owner with implementation concerns, and product owners are reluctant to prioritize work that has no visible user-facing outcome. The debt accumulates. The sprints slow down.

Technical debt was always a metaphor with a compounding interest rate. Decisions made quickly to ship a feature cost more to address the longer they remained in the codebase. Teams that managed debt well built systems that stayed malleable. Teams that ignored it built systems that eventually could not be changed without risk of collapse. AI-assisted development has not eliminated this dynamic. It has accelerated the principal. The speed at which code can be generated means that architectural decisions — or the absence of them — propagate through a codebase faster than ever before.