Technical debt drives cognitive load, but wasteful requirements, stress, and process overload also increase effort and bugs; fixing debt alone won't improve speed or stability.
Technical debt is often treated as the main villain, but the real issue is the cognitive load it adds to engineers. When debt accumulates, developers must keep more hacks and shortcuts in mind, which directly inflates the mental effort required for any change and raises the chance of bugs in production.
The article shows that many other factors sit alongside debt on the same load tree: wasteful business requirements that never add value, constant stress from tight deadlines, and overly complex processes that force engineers to remember endless rules. These drivers alone can slow implementation and degrade runtime stability even if the codebase were debt-free.
Because cognitive load is the true bottleneck, leaders should broaden their focus beyond just cleaning up code. Reducing stress, trimming unnecessary requirements, and simplifying processes can have a bigger impact on delivery speed and reliability than any static analysis tool.
The piece argues that treating technical debt as a leaf on a larger tree reshapes how we prioritize improvement work. By addressing the whole driver ecosystem-processes, workload, and organizational pressures-teams can cut effort creep and improve system stability more effectively than by chasing debt metrics alone.
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