Technical debt is one of the few kinds of debt that doesn't show up anywhere in your financial statements, which is exactly why it's so easy to ignore until it isn't.
The cost shows up first in velocity. Features that should take days start taking weeks because every change requires working around fragile, undocumented code. Teams spend more time understanding what exists than building what's next.
It shows up in reliability next — the same handful of files keep causing incidents because they've become too complex and too load-bearing to touch safely, so nobody wants to.
And it shows up in people. Engineers don't stay long at companies where every day feels like fighting the codebase instead of building the product.
Paying down technical debt doesn't require a mythical "rewrite everything" project — those rarely succeed. It starts with visibility: mapping which parts of the system are highest-risk and highest-friction, then addressing them incrementally alongside regular feature work, with clear ownership and a standard for what "good" looks like going forward.
The businesses that manage technical debt well don't avoid it entirely — that's not realistic. They just make it a visible, managed cost instead of an invisible, compounding one.