concept
Technical Debt
The future cost incurred by choosing an expedient implementation now instead of the better one.
The metaphor is precise and usually misused. Debt is deliberately taken on to buy time, and like financial debt it carries interest — every future change in that area costs more than it should. Taken deliberately, tracked, and repaid before the interest compounds, it is a legitimate instrument.
What is usually called technical debt is not debt at all: it is mess, taken on accidentally, with nobody having decided anything. Mess has all the interest payments and none of the benefit.
The architect's job is to make the interest visible. "This will cost us two extra days on every change to checkout" is a fundable argument; "the code is bad" is not.