From my position on the shelf, I was listening to Brad complain about the overwhelming technical debt in his codebase when I realized it was time to suggest that technical debt might be the software world's most honest metaphor for the Tao itself.
"It's everywhere, Finny," I said, scrolling through thousands of lines of what we generously called 'legacy code.' "Technical debt in every file, every function. Comments that say 'TODO: fix this properly later.' Hacks upon hacks. It should all be refactored, optimized, made efficient."
Finny sat among his fellow bears, each one perfectly imperfect, worn in just the right ways.
"What is technical debt?"
"It's the implied cost of rework caused by choosing an easy, limited solution now instead of a better approach that would take longer. It's all the shortcuts and quick fixes that accumulate over time."
"And you want to eliminate it?"
"Of course! Clean code, perfect architecture, everything optimized and elegant."
"Tell me about the Tao."
The shift caught me off guard. "The Tao? The way that cannot be spoken, the path that cannot be walked?"
"Is the Tao efficient?"
I considered this. "The Tao is... the Tao just is. It doesn't try to be efficient or inefficient. It's the natural way things unfold."
"Does nature have technical debt?"
"Nature has..." I paused, suddenly seeing it. "Nature has vestigial organs, junk DNA, inefficient pathways that exist because they evolved that way. Nature is full of technical debt."
"And does nature rush to refactor itself?"
"No. Nature keeps what works, even if it's messy. The human eye is wired backwards. Our breathing and eating share the same tube. We have wisdom teeth that don't fit our jaws. It's all technical debt from evolution."
"And yet?"
"And yet it works. We see, we eat, we survive. The technical debt is... functional."
"Sun Tzu would say something about this."
"Sun Tzu?" I thought for a moment. "'In war, the way is to avoid what is strong and to strike at what is weak.' Maybe constantly fighting technical debt is attacking where the code is strongest—where it actually works—instead of focusing on where real problems exist."
"What else would the great strategist say?"
"'He who knows when to fight and when not to fight will be victorious.' Not all technical debt needs to be fought. Some of it is actually... load-bearing inefficiency."
"Load-bearing inefficiency. I like that."
I looked at my code again with new eyes. "This function here—it's ugly, inefficient, full of technical debt. But it's been running perfectly for five years. Refactoring it would risk breaking something that works."
"The Tao that can be optimized..."
"...is not the eternal Tao," I finished. "Oh my god, Finny. Technical debt is the Tao of programming. It's the natural accumulation of history, context, and compromise that makes code real instead of theoretical."
"Tell me about morphic resonance."
Another surprising shift. "Rupert Sheldrake's theory? That there's a kind of cosmic memory, where once something happens, it becomes easier for it to happen again?"
"The first time something is made..."
"It becomes easier to make. Like how once the first person ran a four-minute mile, suddenly everyone could do it. Once a crystal forms for the first time, it forms more easily elsewhere. There's some sort of... cosmic weirdness."
"And the first time someone writes code?"
The connection clicked. "The first time someone solves a problem, even messily, it creates a pattern. That pattern works. Maybe not efficiently, but it works. And once it works..."
"It becomes sacred?"
"Not sacred, but... established. It has carved a groove in reality. Refactoring it means fighting against that groove."
"The Yamabushi would understand this."
"The mountain ascetic monks of Japan?"
"They walk the same paths their predecessors walked for centuries. Not because those paths are the most efficient routes up the mountain, but because the walking itself, the repetition, the tradition, creates something."
"Creates what?"
"Connection. Memory. Depth. The inefficiency is the practice."
I looked at a particularly gnarly piece of code, written years ago in a caffeine-fueled sprint. "This code is like a mountain path worn by countless feet. It's not optimal, but it's... proven."
"Would you pave the Yamabushi paths to make them more efficient?"
"That would destroy the entire point. The difficulty, the inefficiency, the technical debt of the path—that's what makes it transformative."
"And your code?"
"Some of my code's technical debt is transformative. It tells the story of problems solved, battles won, compromises made. It's not just debt—it's history."
I pulled up a commit history, looking at years of changes. "Look at this, Finny. Every commit, every hack, every 'TODO: fix later'—it's a record of human struggle with machine logic."
"Like sedimentary rock?"
"Yes! Layers upon layers of solutions, each one making sense in its moment, accumulating into something that works even if it's not optimal."
"The Tao accumulates. It doesn't optimize."
"Optimization would destroy the layers, the history, the context. It would make the code 'better' but less real."
"Tell me about your worst piece of technical debt."
I navigated to a file I was almost embarrassed to show anyone. "This. A function that's grown to 500 lines, does seventeen different things, has no clear purpose, and yet... it's the heart of the application. Everything depends on it."
"Why haven't you refactored it?"
"Because every time I try, I discover another edge case it handles, another problem it solves that I didn't even know existed. It's like..."
"Like what?"
"Like an old-growth forest. Messy, inefficient, full of dead wood and strange symbioses, but pull one thread and the whole ecosystem might collapse."
"The Tao includes the dead wood."
"The Tao includes everything. Even the mess. Especially the mess."
"So technical debt is..."
"Technical debt is the Tao of code made manifest. It's what happens when human problems meet machine logic and compromise into something that actually works in the real world."
"And your desire to eliminate it?"
"Is my desire to impose an artificial order on an organic system. It's trying to make code exist outside of time, history, and context."
"Sun Tzu says 'The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.'"
"Maybe the supreme art of programming is to work with technical debt without constantly fighting it. To recognize it as part of the system's strength, not just its weakness."
"Like your inefficiency with efficiency systems?"
I laughed, suddenly seeing the parallel. "Yes! My personal technical debt—all my failed productivity systems, abandoned schedules, inefficient habits—they're not bugs. They're the accumulated history of my attempts to be human."
"And trying to refactor yourself?"
"Would be like trying to refactor evolution. Sure, I could design a theoretically better human, but I'd lose everything that makes me actually human—the contradictions, the vestigial emotions, the beautiful inefficiencies."
"The Yamabushi don't climb the mountain to reach the top efficiently."
"They climb it to be changed by the climbing. The inefficiency, the difficulty, the technical debt of the path—that's the teacher."
"And your code?"
"My code doesn't need to be perfect. It needs to be honest. It needs to reflect the real struggles, compromises, and solutions that emerged from actual problems."
"The Tao of Technical Debt."
"Yes. Accepting that code, like life, accumulates history. That perfect refactoring is often inferior to imperfect functionality. That sometimes the debt isn't debt at all—it's wealth in a form we don't recognize."
I saved my work without changing a single line, but seeing it all differently.
"Brad, what if the cosmic weirdness of morphic resonance applies to code? What if every time someone solves a problem, even messily, it makes it easier for others to solve similar problems?"
"Then technical debt isn't just personal history—it's collective wisdom. Every hack is a prayer to the programming gods that says 'this worked for me, may it work for you.'"
"And efficiency?"
"Efficiency would erase the prayers, delete the history, optimize away the very thing that makes code human—its imperfection, its struggle, its accumulated wisdom."
"The Tao that can be optimized..."
"Is not the eternal Tao. The code that can be perfected is not living code."
That evening, I wrote code with technical debt intentionally. Not sloppily, but honestly. I left comments that said "This is weird but it works." I chose solutions that fit the moment rather than some theoretical future.
I coded like a Yamabushi walks—not seeking the shortest path, but the one that teaches.
And for the first time, my code felt not just functional, but alive.
Technical debt wasn't the enemy of good code. It was the evidence that humans had been here, solving real problems in real time.
The Tao includes the inefficient, the accumulated, the historically contingent.
And so does good code.
And so do I.