This is a Time of Technical Deflation – Dan Shapiro’s Blog
January 29, 2026
Now economists have this thing they call deflation. For an economy, it’s a nightmare. Prices drop day after day, creating a psychological trap where consumers stop spending. Why buy a washing machine today when it will be cheaper tomorrow?1 The whole economy grinds to a halt.
But what is a ‘trap’ for a nation is a miracle for a codebase. Usually, deflation is bad for debtors because money becomes harder to come by. But technical debt is different: you don’t owe money, you owe work. And the cost of work is what’s deflating. The cost to pay off your debt – the literal dollars and hours required to fix the mess – is diminishing. It is cheaper to clean up your code today than it has ever been. And if you put it off? It becomes cheaper still. This leads to a striking reversal: technical debt2 becomes a wise investment3.
The observation here about what’s happening with code generation is profound, as software engineers’ best practise is always to try and avoid tech debt. You move fast and cut corners, and then at some point, the cost will always catch up with this. There are many examples of companies who’ve reached a point where their codebase essentially no longer allowed them to innovate. Sometimes there are exogenous forces that cause this. Apple’s transition from classic Mac to Mac OS X on a smaller scale, the introduction of iOS 7 with its move away from skeuomorphic design language to a much simpler design language are two such moments.
But here Dan Shapiro argues for the opposite: because we’re in a moment of the collapse in the price of producing code, a deflationary cycle, then tech debt is inexpensive. It might not be true for everyone, every circumstance, but it’s definitely something I think well worth considering.
