The WyCash Portfolio Management System

The source of the analogy the essay extends from software to statute.

One point of precision the record should carry, because the essay does not: this document never uses the phrase "technical debt". The full text was fetched and searched. It uses "debt" four times and "technical" never modifies it:

Shipping first time code is like going into debt. A little debt speeds development so long as it is paid back promptly with a rewrite.

Every minute spent on not-quite-right code counts as interest on that debt.

So 1992 is the origin of the metaphor rather than of the two-word term, which became current later through secondary writing. The attribution is universal and not unreasonable, but it is looser than it looks.

Cunningham returned to the point in a 2009 video, transcript at cmdev.com/papers/debt-metaphor/, to argue that the metaphor had been widely misread: debt in his sense is code that reflects a still-developing understanding of the problem, not code written badly on purpose with an intention to fix it later.