The idea that "all code is technical debt" is saying that all code has a non-zero interest rate. In popular parlance though, we don't actually call code technical debt unless we think the interest rate is unnecessarily high.
To try and be more practical, logging is a good example. For some, cleaning up logs once every month or so is just a cost of doing business, it is not avoidable. Similarly, just adding a "grep -v DEBUG" is also just a cost of doing business and watching the logs. Someone else might look at this and call it technical debt, the lack of logrotate & overly verbose logging make all of the above unnecessary.
There are just lots of dimensions to it. To one person, having those DEBUG logs might have been the difference in finding a problem vs not, yet to another those DEBUG logs may never be useful and all they do is create noise. The interest rate we assign to code is incredibly subjective, depending on both task and person.
The idea that "all code is technical debt" is saying that all code has a non-zero interest rate. In popular parlance though, we don't actually call code technical debt unless we think the interest rate is unnecessarily high.
To try and be more practical, logging is a good example. For some, cleaning up logs once every month or so is just a cost of doing business, it is not avoidable. Similarly, just adding a "grep -v DEBUG" is also just a cost of doing business and watching the logs. Someone else might look at this and call it technical debt, the lack of logrotate & overly verbose logging make all of the above unnecessary.
There are just lots of dimensions to it. To one person, having those DEBUG logs might have been the difference in finding a problem vs not, yet to another those DEBUG logs may never be useful and all they do is create noise. The interest rate we assign to code is incredibly subjective, depending on both task and person.