While this metaphor was explicitly developed for the software industry, it has many corollaries in other industries. For example, SophieDev Anon is trying his hand at 3D modeling. As a TD in the industry, I have seen literally dozens of examples of people -- artists in particular -- piling up technical debt rushing work with excessive shortcuts to try and meet some intermediate asset checkpoint and just get it out the door. But during that effort, they were not considering the later costs to fix their hot messes
before being able to continue the overall project itself. That's technical debt in the creative industry, and it has direct implications for our robowaifu designs.
Another more apparent technical debt for some of us might be the choice to use the Python programming language as a means to 'quickly' get various AI projects up and going. Just like incurring real-world debts, this can speed up the prototyping stage measurably. But let's imagine that it turns out that multi-gigabyte libraries might have a hard time even fitting inside a small compute hardware platform within our early robowaifus -- much less running well on them. Further, suppose that robowaifus need to be able to respond in realtime/neartime for most AI-related tasks, and we find out that literally the only way to make these processes work properly is by using embedded C code on the microcontrollers instead. Now, the original ideas will need to be recast into this more efficiency-oriented approach
first before it will actually work IRL. That's technical debt in software industry (with a close corollary in the electronics industry), and it must be repaid quickly if the project isn't to stall out.
We could discuss mechanics, power, materials, and so on. Technical debt is a potential phenomenon for all of these arenas. This is an important and fairly deep topic actually, and I'd like to begin a discussion with robowaifuists about how we can both take advantage of technical debt, and also remediate it ('pay it back') in our works too.
If we don't account properly for this phenomenon early, we almost certainly as a group will fall literally years behind in our ability to deliver robowaifus (hopefully well before the globohomo ruins everything).
For any anons unaware of the concept, here's where the idea got started:
http://wiki.c2.com/?WardExplainsDebtMetaphor
https://www.agilealliance.org/introduction-to-the-technical-debt-concept