Not all technical debt is the same kind of debt
A note on Technical Debt Quadrant by Martin Fowler, published on martinfowler.com.
Two axes, four boxes, and it resolves an argument that otherwise runs on vibes. Was the shortcut deliberate or accidental, and was it prudent or reckless?
The pairing that matters most in practice is deliberate-and-prudent: we know this is not the right design, we are shipping it anyway because the deadline is real, and we know what we will owe. That is a defensible engineering decision, and it is entirely different from accidental-and-reckless, which is the same code written by someone who did not know there was a better option.
The two look identical in the diff. They need completely different responses, one needs a ticket, the other needs a conversation about what the team knows.
The reason to keep this to hand is that it makes debt discussable without blame. "This is deliberate-prudent and here is the interest we are paying" is a sentence a founder can act on. "The code is bad" is not. For anyone doing review work on someone else's codebase, having language that separates the decision from the decider is most of what makes the review useful rather than insulting.
This is the thinking behind why boring code is a feature you ship to your future self.