I think this ignores a couple of fundamental truths. First, the more you practice something, the better/faster you are at it. If you spend most of your time writing crappy, half-baked code, sure, you'll be very fast at that. If you practice writing well-thought-out code, you will be fast at writing that. And you'll have more time to think about the next feature with the slop you didn't have to wade through. It's also much easier and faster to write clean greenfield code than to clean up a bunch of legacy code that all depends on each other. Finally, work is scheduled by non-technical people. If you find your "small amount" of technical debt has morphed into a calcified mass of dried-out pasta. good luck talking them into giving you enough time to disentangle it.