Tech Debt — Ship Fast, Pay Later
Sixty seconds to ship as much as you can. Every feature adds tech debt, and debt slows you down. Hire, buy tooling, or refactor — no sign-up.
- 🚢 Shipped0
- 📦 Features banked0
- ⚡ Team output0.0/s
- 🧱 Tech debt lower is better0/100
Click Ship to start the clock.
How to play
- You have sixty seconds. Click Ship to ship a feature — every feature you ship is a point.
- Shipping creates tech debt, and debt slows everything down: at 100 you are working at a tenth of your speed. It never stops you, it just makes you useless.
- Spend banked features on a team (compounds), on tooling (less debt per feature), or on refactoring (buys back speed). Refactoring gets more expensive the worse the mess is, so cleaning early is cheaper than cleaning late.
How it works
Sixty seconds on the clock. Click Ship to ship a feature; every feature is a point, and every feature adds tech debt. Debt is the multiplier on everything you do — at 100 you are working at a tenth of your speed, so it never quite stops you, it just makes you useless. Spend what you have banked on a team that ships while you do other things, on tooling that makes every future feature cost less debt, or on refactoring to buy back speed you already lost. Refactoring is priced by the size of the mess, so cleaning early is cheaper than cleaning late — which is the entire joke, and also true.
A game, not an estimate. Real tech debt does not cap at 100 and there is no button that removes eighteen points of it.
Frequently asked questions
What actually counts as a point?
Every feature you ship, whether you clicked it out by hand or your team shipped it while you were buying something. The number in the middle is your score, and the rank at the end is just a name for where it landed.
Is clicking fast enough to win?
No. Clicking alone tops out well below the middle ranks — a run that never hires is capped by how fast a human can click, while a team compounds. The reverse is also true: hiring without ever cleaning up drives debt to 100 and your whole team down to a tenth speed.
Why does refactoring get more expensive?
Because it is priced by how much debt you are carrying, not by how many times you have done it. A cheap flat price made "never hire, just spam refactor" the single best strategy, which is both bad game design and a lie about how codebases work. The price never escalates per purchase, so a bad run is always recoverable.