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Ward Cunningham coined the metaphor in 1992 and meant something precise: ship code that reflects your current, partial understanding, then rewrite it once you understand better. He never meant careless code. The difference decides whether your refactoring budget gets approved.
Two costs land the moment you add a flag, and neither is visible that day. It creates a branch in your code that nothing will ever make you delete, and it lets someone change production behavior without passing through any of the safety machinery you built for changing production behavior.
Most modernization efforts stall not because the technology is wrong but because the prioritization and org alignment are. Here's the framework that actually gets legacy systems replaced without halting delivery.
