Delivery vs Maintainability
also called Short-term Delivery vs Long-term Maintainability, Speed vs Quality
Choosing where to take deliberate shortcuts, based on which kinds of debt are cheap to repay and which compound.
The choice is almost never "fast" or "careful" wholesale. It is fast in the cheap places, careful in the expensive ones — and knowing which is which is the skill.
Cheap to repay: the internal implementation of a module, a naming scheme, a rough admin screen, a manual process that runs monthly. One refactor each, contained.
Expensive: the data model (migration under load), the public API or event contract (every consumer must change), service boundaries (effectively a rewrite), and identity or tenancy models. Security posture is not on this list at all, because it is not debt — it is an unpriced liability.
Three questions decide the specific case. What does being late actually cost — for a product proving demand or a regulatory deadline, this term usually dominates. Will we still care in a year — debt on something due for replacement is never repaid, and is therefore free. And is repayment on our schedule or somebody else's — debt that a security or compliance event can call in unpredictably is a different instrument entirely.
Whatever is chosen, write it down: what the shortcut is, what it costs per change, and what triggers repayment. Undocumented shortcuts are not debt, they are mess.