Read the traces. When an incident fires, the trace panel shows which
debt category caused it. Address the root cause, not just the symptom.
Ethics has compounding returns. Forbidding dark patterns loses short-term
income but slows alignment drift, which protects automation capability later.
Security debt is asymmetric. CVEs accumulate slowly but incident severity
is high. A few percentage points in security allocation is cheap insurance.
Power infrastructure is a runway. Invest early at a slight short-term cost
to avoid a hard ceiling when data centres unlock.
Defer unlocks strategically. Accepting a stage too early — before the debt
vector is manageable — often accelerates incident frequency faster than the
productivity gain can compensate.