There is a price tag for innovating quickly and easily. One of the costly line items is technical debt, the increased drag on the ability to do software innovation that arises from a very specific source: failing to code with a proper level of care and diligence. Writing code is much like another procedural exercise -— writing laws and regulations. The less care one takes in the process of creating these instructions, the harder it will be to diagnose unintended problems and fix them, or even to build on the existing procedural foundations.