I&#x27;m currently on a month-long crusade against what initially was a single small poor code choice (a denormalized model in Rails) from 4 years ago.<p>As it stands, over 5% of the codebase has been deleted so far without reducing functionality. One could argue that a significant part of the application were just hacks to get around the original hack, and hacks to get around those etc.<p>Not sure how to break that down into the categories provided, but given that the problems add up to proportions unimaginable to anybody but IRS, debt as an analogy works well enough for me.