Architecture & practice·Complexity and how it accumulates
there is a dead flag, three commented-out blocks and a helper nobody has called since 2022.
Cruft
Also calledmess, sloppy code
Code that is simply badly made: unclear, redundant, dead, or wrong in ways that were avoidable at the time. It is worth keeping distinct from technical debt because the two have different conversations — debt was a deliberate trade for speed and can be defended, while cruft was never a trade and has no upside to weigh. Calling cruft 'tech debt' is how teams end up arguing about priorities instead of just cleaning up.