By: Audrey Denise B. Cachuela
In the early stages, speed usually feels like a good thing. Features are getting out the door, leadership sees progress on the roadmap, customers keep seeing updates, and developers finally get to watch their work go live instead of sitting in planning for weeks. From the outside, the product looks healthy, even while technical debt starts building underneath it.
That’s why teams often miss the warning signs early on. When releases keep moving, it’s easy to assume the process is working. The problems usually show up later, once all the rushed decisions start colliding with each other, and the product becomes harder to maintain.
Konstantin Klyagin, founder and CEO of Redwerk, has spent years working with companies that need software built for long-term growth, not just short-term output. Redwerk puts a strong focus on maintainable systems, structured workflows, and scalable engineering because the company has seen what happens when teams prioritize delivery speed over technical stability.
The cost almost never shows up immediately. It tends to appear months later, when releases slow down, bugs start resurfacing, and developers realize they are spending more time repairing old features than building new ones.
Why Speed Feels Productive at First
Fast-moving teams often get rewarded early because the momentum is easy to see. Product managers can point to new releases every week, stakeholders see constant progress, and investors feel reassured as updates continue to roll out. Over time, that visibility starts shaping internal culture. People begin associating speed with effectiveness, even when the long-term impact of that pace has not been fully tested.
That mindset exists in a lot of software companies because visible output is easier to track than long-term stability. Shipping a feature today feels more important than cleaning up architecture nobody outside engineering will ever notice.
According to the DORA Accelerate State of DevOps Report, deployment frequency and lead time are still commonly used to evaluate software delivery performance. (Source: DORA Accelerate State of DevOps Report 2024, 2024)
The issue is that speed can create the illusion that everything underneath the product is healthy, too. For a while, teams can keep shipping despite messy code and weak documentation. Customers may not notice anything wrong yet, so leadership assumes the process is healthy because releases are still happening.
That’s what makes technical debt difficult to spot early. Most of the damage stays hidden until the product grows large enough that every shortcut starts affecting something else.
Konstantin Klyagin has spoken openly about the difference between short-term velocity and sustainable software quality. He argues that rushing development usually creates more delays later because teams eventually have to repair unstable foundations before they can move forward again.
How Technical Debt Starts Building
Architecture Starts Taking a Back Seat
When deadlines tighten, architecture is usually one of the first things teams stop talking about. Developers stop thinking about how systems will scale six months from now because everyone is focused on getting the next release out.
At first, those trade-offs seem manageable until the problems show up later. Small updates start affecting unrelated parts of the product, and developers become hesitant to touch older code because one small change can create issues somewhere completely different.
Research published in The Journal of Systems and Software identified architecture debt as one of the most common forms of technical debt in modern software projects. (Source: The Evolution of Technical Debt from DevOps to Generative AI: A Multivocal Literature Review, 2025) This is usually the stage where development slows down without anybody fully understanding why.
Documentation Quietly Stops Happening
Documentation usually fades gradually. Although nobody announces that it no longer matters, teams simply convince themselves they will handle it later. Decisions stay inside Slack threads, meeting calls, or individual memory instead of being written down somewhere accessible.
That works until somebody leaves the team or a new engineer has to troubleshoot an older system. Then people end up wasting hours trying to piece together decisions that should have been documented from the start.
Redwerk has consistently emphasized process documentation because distributed engineering teams cannot function efficiently without shared operational knowledge. Without documentation, developers end up solving the same confusion repeatedly.
Testing Gets Compressed
Most companies do not completely abandon QA, but they narrow down its scope by becoming selective on regression testing, skipping edge cases, and relying more heavily on assumptions to meet deadlines. This makes bugs harder to isolate, and as the product grows more interconnected, fixing one issue often creates another somewhere else.
Stripe’s Developer Coefficient report found that developers spend a large portion of their time dealing with maintenance work, debugging, and technical debt instead of creating new functionality. (Source: The Developer Coefficient, Stripe, 2018)
Maintainability Stops Being Part of the Discussion
Once companies become overly focused on release speed, maintainability usually fades into the background. Code reviews get rushed, temporary fixes stay in production longer than expected, and refactoring keeps getting delayed because another deadline is always approaching. The product may still move quickly for a while, but with every new release, the system underneath it becomes harder to manage.
Konstantin Klyagin has repeatedly emphasized that software quality matters because rushed systems eventually create friction that slows the entire company down. Teams rarely notice how much technical debt has accumulated until simple work starts feeling unexpectedly difficult.
What Happens Six Months Later
Releases Stop Feeling Smooth
This is usually the point where teams realize something has changed. The same developers who used to push releases confidently now double-check everything before deployment because nobody fully trusts the system anymore. Updates that once felt routine start feeling unpredictable, and teams spend far more time testing changes than they used to.
According to DORA research, unstable systems and increasing rework eventually reduce overall software delivery performance. (Source: Distilled Summary of 2024/2025 Google DORA Report, 2025) Ironically, the pressure to move faster often creates the conditions that slow teams down later.
Bugs Become Harder to Untangle
Technical debt rarely creates clean problems. Once enough shortcuts pile up, debugging becomes messy because issues spread across multiple systems at once. Developers start tracing dependencies for hours just to understand where something actually broke. A small change can suddenly create side effects in parts of the product nobody expected.
A 2024 industrial case study published on arXiv found that technical debt can significantly affect software delivery timelines depending on system complexity. (Source: Towards Measuring the Impact of Technical Debt on Lead Time: An Industrial Case Study, 2024) At that point, the cost becomes visible in everyday operations.
Developers Start Burning Out
This part gets overlooked more than almost anything else. Most developers enjoy solving problems and building products people use; that is the kind of work that keeps teams engaged. Technical debt changes the nature of the job completely.
Instead of building, developers spend increasing amounts of time repairing unstable systems, tracing regressions, and cleaning up rushed code written months earlier. That frustration builds slowly.
Industry reporting has consistently shown that developers experience higher stress and frustration levels when working inside poorly maintained systems with growing technical debt. (Source: The Hidden Cost of Technical Debt in Software, 2025) Eventually, the morale problem becomes a productivity problem too.
The Real Cost Is Delayed
Technical debt feels manageable in the beginning because the consequences do not show up immediately, which is exactly why shortcuts become so easy to justify. Teams convince themselves they are saving time because releases are still going out on schedule and nothing seems seriously broken yet, but six months later the situation often looks very different. Releases start feeling riskier, developers slow down because they no longer fully trust the system, and teams end up spending more time maintaining old code than actually improving the product.
Konstantin Klyagin has described this as the difference between temporary speed and sustainable development. Redwerk focuses heavily on building systems that can continue scaling cleanly over time because shortcuts made early in development almost always create bigger obstacles later on. Most companies are not really avoiding the cost of technical debt; they are simply pushing it further down the road.
Speed Without Structure Eventually Catches Up
Nobody is arguing that software teams should not move quickly. Shipping matters. Momentum matters. Deadlines matter.
But speed without structure rarely lasts very long. Teams still need stable architecture, proper documentation, realistic testing practices, and enough breathing room to maintain the product responsibly. Otherwise, the same shortcuts that helped the company move quickly at the beginning eventually become the reason everything slows down later.
Redwerk works with companies that need software built for long-term growth, not just fast releases. By focusing on maintainable architecture, structured workflows, and sustainable development practices, the team helps businesses avoid the operational slowdown that technical debt eventually creates.
